


sometime the wolf

by mortsix



Category: Forgotten Realms, The Legend of Drizzt Series - R. A. Salvatore
Genre: (Imaginary) Cannibalism, (everyone has a bad time), Altered Mental States, Body Horror, Delusions, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, Eye Trauma, Gore, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Prostitution, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Self-Harm, Strangulation, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-07-22 02:11:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7415215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortsix/pseuds/mortsix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[AU, spoilers for <em>Maestro</em>.] 'Hell is empty, and all the devils are here'—or, ten days in the Underdark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all days are nights to see

**Author's Note:**

> Title swiped from Cormac McCarthy's _Blood Meridian_.
> 
> Makes more sense if you've read _Maestro_. Otherwise: during probably the worst road-trip ever, Artemis and Drizzt become afflicted with magical 'madness' (questionable trope, partly dismantled here). Artemis recovers, sort of; Drizzt... doesn't. Everything, somehow, gets even worse.
> 
> This was definitely going to be straight-up porn at some point; and then it became an overly earnest mouth-breathy character study of two people with about three centuries of trauma between them, while one of them undergoes psychological collapse. Massive liberties taken with canon, lore, etc etc. 
> 
> Artemis hasn't forgiven Jarlaxle.

He was woken by his own breathing: hollow, ghoul-like. Lying there, cheek to stone, Artemis shuddered.

I am blind. That was his first, dizzy, idiot thought. No—there were shapes on the gloom, sharpening their edges. The Underdark.

The claw had carved a trench in his back, before he rallied. Following that frayed thread of memory led him, windingly, to the kill: the demon's brittle scream, as the sword cut meat and bone. The corpse, sleek with gore, falling cleanly in two. Like halved, ripe fruit.

He remembered stumbling back from it; remembered the creep of blood down his back. A shout? Or a voice very near. Ringing in his ears. The air had changed—glassy distortion; a lurch. His legs folded. The ground rose up. He thought: venom, in the claws. Then his vision capsized, and was drowned.

“—convinced, at all, that he is who you say he is—”

“Do you know, I believe I can tell the difference between Artemis Entreri and a _demon_. Call it merely a hunch.”

The jostle of sound resolved itself into voices. Jarlaxle and Drizzt. Arguing—not for the first time. Delight heaped upon delight, he thought. Better to have the demons back.

He was distracted, though, by his body's misery, which radiated out from the wound. The film of sweat on him felt as cold as well-water, and every joint ached. His gut gave a dull twinge: he set his teeth against the quick, upwelling nausea. He could see his wrist, which was black above the cuff. The mask and illusion were still in place despite his fall. Further away, his sword and dagger lay upon a rock. The shorter blade became a mirror for the ceiling's teeth, and it was sheeny with gore.

How much time had he lost?

“Even if he is—and I'm doubtful of that—why should I care what happens to him?”

“Because I say we need him, and it is on _my_ coin and resources, _my_ information and connections, that we make this journey. You are free, of course, to go it alone—but it will be far shorter, and likely conclude with some half-dozen demons feasting on your entrails.”

Charming.

“No more dangerous than travelling with him,” came the reply. Drizzt, weary. They sat on either side of him. And he was the sack of goods to be lugged about, evidently. “Had you not prohibited it, he would cheerfully put a knife in my back. He still might. Quasit venom is kinder than what I _should_ do.”

“I don't require you to like him. But I don't recall appointing you his judge and headsman, either.”

“It is not a mortal wound.” He heard in Drizzt's voice what he'd heard in his own, many times. The futility of an argument Jarlaxle had already won. “And my supplies are already running short. It would—”

“You can spare them for this,” Artemis rasped. Blood sluiced in his head as he pushed himself up on his hands. He almost laughed at Drizzt's mutinous look.

With that interruption, Jarlaxle brightened. “Ah, good.” Artemis stared him in the eye. Saw the next words grow and die in his mouth, and was satisfied.

All their healing potions had been spent, after a bloody, frenzied skirmish with a score of demons. This close to the city, any detectable magic would be as good as sending forth a herald to proclaim their approach—or so Jarlaxle said. Happy visions of Baenre children falling upon them with sword, spell, and thumbscrews. Alone, the two of them might pass muster: like a magician's trick in a bazaar, Jarlaxle’s coin could make anything disappear. But Drizzt was a famed heretic, and associating with him was a death-sentence signed and sealed—unless delivering his heart in a box.

Secrecy, then. Which left them little in the way of medicine. The rudimentary, or the mundane: draughts and lesser potions; milked poppy husks, salves, and suture. With noxious grace and a smile tucked into his cheek, Jarlaxle insisted that Drizzt, not he, should stitch the wound, as Drizzt was _far_ better-versed in such things.

As it turned out, experience was worse than ineptitude when tempered by loathing.

The stink of spice and rot hung thickly about, from the salve Drizzt smeared around the wound: henbane, cloves—and something else, crisp and bitingly astringent. Next, he heard Drizzt uncork the bottle of distilled alcohol and douse a cloth in it. Spatter on the stone. A pause. Then Drizzt pushed the wadded fistful hard into his shoulder.

Pain, obscene: the scream of flesh ripped wide. His back arched, but he refused to pull away—refused Do'Urden that victory, however petty. The darkness clotted in his eyes like blood in a bruise; and behind his clamped teeth, sound broke from his throat. Echoed, guttural, between the walls. Punishment had never been his better teacher, but he'd had no shortage of lessons in it, and Royuset would have smacked him across the mouth for that word: once, for using street-slang (“—do well to remember, if you can, that you do not live in the _gutter_ now—”); twice, for disrespect.

“I don't believe I know that one,” Jarlaxle said, with a singsong lilt that seemed calculated to annoy.

Artemis, panting through aftershocks, glowered at him. He sat nearby, cat-relaxed, with one leg bent and the other straight before him. His elbow cupped in the other hand, he tapped an earring with a fingernail, and the swinging gold winked like a coin in the low light. That, too, was his doing: a wax taper spiked on an iron base, drooling as it burned. Beeswax, not crude tallow—of course. Shadows washed his cheeks and chin, his nose now monstrously long, now flat to his face; his eyelashes a trap for the marble of his eye. To Artemis he looked as vicious and unformed as any beast that stalked these tunnels; and doubly treacherous.

“If you will keep making so much noise, we will not go unnoticed here for long,” Drizzt said, prising the cloth away. Like stripping skin. Despite the reeking concoction spread on it, the wound burned in earnest. At the corner of his eye, Drizzt peeled one hand and the other, and set down wet gloves. Drizzt's shadow moved slantwise over the wall, and there was a partial eclipse, his bare fist blotting out the light as he drew needle through flame.

“Spare me the hand-wringing,” Artemis said. He was drowsy, agitated. A fit of shivering gripped and released him. “The demons will come regardless, as they are _everywhere_.” Still, he lowered his voice so the walls wouldn't repeat it. Make the demons work for their next meal, at least.

Drizzt hesitated. When it came, the skimming touch of Drizzt's bare fingers sent fine, hot sensation through his nape. He resented it. Set his teeth and held himself still. Then, more firmly, the hand splayed upon his back, where the skin was tacky with blood, and pressed down. Forced him to lean forward. The wound was pinched, one ragged edge to another, and his heart thudded in his chest like a fist upon a door.

Leaning in, Drizzt murmured, “And you'll be glad to meet them with one good arm instead of two, I'm sure.”

The needle breached the torn meat of his shoulder; it drove through, and through again. First stitch, pulled taut. He clenched his jaw. This pain was narrower: it drilled into the wound's queasy glow. At the corner of his eye he saw a black line and a silver glint, which conjured a strange image: the wound was a cleft in an ice floe, and Drizzt was fishing in his blood. For his _soul_ , perhaps, he thought cynically. He resented Drizzt's efforts to make of him a virtuous man no less than Jarlaxle's to make him self-indulged and carefree. Jarlaxle, at least, knew himself to be unscrupulous. Drizzt went forth under the banner of righteousness, and thought himself unimpeachable.

Artemis kept the stagger from his voice when the needle slid in again. “If you work faster,” he said, “I won't have to.” He knew how Drizzt's face looked without seeing it. Hard-eyed and severe, hatred worn like a secret. A well-thumbed memory, made new.

“Ah,” said Drizzt, “then perhaps you'd prefer to do this _yourself_.” An awful pull; contorted pain. The needle was plucked out—he hissed—and dropped on its thread. Hung, swaying, against his spine.

“Drizzt,” Jarlaxle said, soft.

The drow looked at each other, their silence like humidity. Jarlaxle's expression grew calmer, yielded nothing. Might as well try to out-riddle a sphinx.

That seemed to occur to Drizzt—his chin lowered a fraction toward his chest. His surrender was aped by his shadow. In retrieving the needle, his fingertips gently grazed the heel of Artemis's shoulder-blade. It was almost pleasant; and worse than pain.

Another stitch, and another. Artemis lost count. Through the quiet—which Jarlaxle, mercifully, was not filling with prattle—he heard Drizzt's leathers creaking at the elbow, the run of the thread; Drizzt's neat, measured exhale. His spine itched at the thought of an easy knife-thrust he could not see or stop.

Drizzt muttered to Jarlaxle, too low to hear. A scrap, perhaps: “—up as you go?”

“I never promised you a pleasant time of it.”

“You led me to believe—” Inaudible. “—least some of the outcomes.”

“This is the Underdark. Certainly, you know it as well as I.”

“Not like this.” Drizzt's voice was halting in his concentration. “We are still days away, and not—”

“And we are making good progress.”

“We are still moving too slowly.”

“Then you shall have to be patient a while longer,” Jarlaxle said. "Because we must pause for rest.”

“They can smell blood from a mile off. We cannot stay here.”

“I’ve no doubt that you could keep going indefinitely, my friend. That isn’t the issue.”

Sunken into itself, the candle threw steep, extravagant shadows upon the wall. He saw Jarlaxle in distorted profile, and Drizzt's head, trembling, part-swallowed by a stalactite. Artemis let himself be distracted from the pinch of blood-slippery thumb and forefinger, and the knuckle that scraped his spine on every pass.

“On the contrary—I'm exhausted.” Drizzt paused to sop up blood from the wound with a dry rag. “I imagine that you are, too. If we're still here in an hour, we'll find ourselves overrun again; and as things stand, I like our chances much less.”

“I think it highly unlikely that there is anything _left_ within a ten-mile radius to be lured here.”

All their disagreements went like this, Artemis thought. Disavowing any quarrel, while they drew their lines deeper upon the contested terrain. In the end, Drizzt always conceded the ground; and eventually he'd realise that, too.

Drizzt said, “Do you feel like gambling on that?”

“Ah, well, you know me,” Jarlaxle said, with trying cheer. “Naturally.”

Humourless: “Then you’ll be taking first watch.”

“Very well. Done.”

Half-listening, Artemis found that the rope between his thoughts had become a thinner wire to walk. He was drifting. He felt warm, and light in the head; but curiously little of anything else. Needle-puncture and drag of thread: in, through, out. Mechanical, abstracted from pain. Then a fingertip running lightly, attentively, down the row.

The thread was cut. Drizzt spread cold honey on the skin-seam; looped a bandage around it, knotted the linen ends. “All right,” he said. He sat back on his heels, coming into Artemis's line of sight. The dimming candlelight slithered over the gloss on his upraised hands. Artemis, caught off guard, felt some low internal shudder at the sight. Grisly, intimate—Drizzt wet to the wrists with his blood.

“Thank you, my friend,” Jarlaxle said.

Drizzt took the offered cloth and rubbed his hands clean. Without looking at Artemis, said, “Anything else?"

“No, no,” Jarlaxle said. “Go—rest. I'll wake you in a few hours.” Drizzt nodded, and rose. Jarlaxle began to stow away his effects. To Artemis he said, with a candid, sidelong look: “How does it feel?”

“It doesn't,” Artemis said. He drew up his bloody shirt and laced it at his neck. Felt the pull in the stitches. I need a drink, he thought, and found himself looking almost kindly upon the lethal swill Drizzt had used to burn the wound clean. “Despite his _best efforts_.”

Between nooses and tendrils of hanging moss, Drizzt stopped and straightened. Artemis thought the drow would lunge for him. Wished it, almost. Better to have it out now than embark upon another four days of bile and backbiting. His weapons were close at hand. He watched the narrow, restive slope of Drizzt's shoulder; and waited.

Instead, Drizzt loped away, and settled beyond the light's reach, on even ground. His borrowed piwafwi became a stone outcrop worn smooth by time, which the eye swept heedlessly over. Like Jarlaxle he took reverie with eyes closed; and poised, as if listening. A sentinel at the gates.

“You seem determined to provoke him,” Jarlaxle muttered. He blew out the candle; went on speaking in the dark. A bluish, organic tangle of smoke was rising before his mouth. “Why, I have no idea. It was tedious, and now it is dangerous, and if you don't tolerate him better your corpses will be sharing a hole in the ground.”

Artemis said, on the edge of his temper, “Are you so _deceived_ , that—”

Jarlaxle's voice lashed across his, no louder. “Go to sleep, Artemis.”

You have no right to use that name, he thought, but did not say.

 

* * *

 

He flinched.

What—

Jarlaxle was crouched beside him, unreadable behind the calm that was Jarlaxle's custom, and touching his forearm with a light gloved hand. There was no light; he had no sense of the hour, how long he had sat in this same corridor, miles below the surface. And against the other wall, a drow he did not know—Entreri, it was Entreri, leant on the shoulder not lately stitched, and folded in wary sleep.

He breathed out. “I'm awake,” he said.

“Good.“ This, with a perfunctory smile. Jarlaxle's elegant face betrayed his tiredness, a little. “Then I'll leave the watch to you. I shan't take more than a couple of hours.”

“Yes, I...” His voice cracked.

Jarlaxle said, “Are you all right?“

The dream frayed as he strained after it. The grey pall above, and the sun a bedded pearl, pale as the full moon. Flashes of a hectic run through woodland—roots frozen in writhing, the dry clashing of leaves—toward something that screamed high and clear like a trapped animal. He could not remember what he had seen, only that he wished he had not seen it. Under Jarlaxle's scrutiny, he curled his hands into fists and pressed them to his thighs.

“I don't know.”

“Not long,” Jarlaxle said, and squeezed his wrist. “My word on it.”

He nodded. He was not foolish enough to believe their time in Menzoberranzan would be as brief as this rescue, with Jarlaxle tending other plans in the hope of finer fruit; but he let his face resolve into something more placid. Jarlaxle withdrew, his hat a flourish of colour at hip-height, and took up a place against the wall near Entreri.

Raising himself, Drizzt walked to the end of the corridor, where it grew into a cavern with a ceiling like a temple's dome, the pinnacle as high and as smooth. He heard water tumbling into water from a great height: a waterfall, a lake. A white net of froth, churning.

They had been underground for four days, or five. Long enough to displace all his years on the surface, where the sun still hurt his eyes. For the first hour in Luskan's undercity, he saw in clumsy monochrome, like a human groping in the deep. Then the darkness lifted a veil: his sight cleared, and he saw in a thousand fractions of grey. There was no strain. Newly sensitised, he felt vibrations through the stone, and draughts of warmer air. The hiss of upthrown dust was like the breaking of a wave in his ear. Darkness, silence, and threat: his body's native tongue.

Drow were not made for the surface. He knew that; and could hardly forget, when all things conspired to mark him as strange. At times, the whole endeavour seemed mad or perverse. But he had been determined to adapt; to prove he belonged there, and not in a city that trafficked in murder, gorging on itself but always wanting for meat. Having escaped, he had thought anything would be better than brutal drow custom, or his mother's justice. He had not reckoned with ten years alone in the Northdark, his mind cracking along fault-lines the drow created. He had been like a beast: blank, predatory, and used to the off-sweet stench of gore in his clothes. Staring down his father's wraith, his mind prickling, he—

“When you saw him... what did you think?" Effron had asked him, when he told the story. It was late; but they had been imprisoned in that dungeon for months, and one hour was the same as another. Bruise-like exhaustion rimmed Effron's eye-sockets. "Illusion?”

“No,” he had said. “No, not that. I didn't—I thought I was mad.”

Afterward, there was no body to bury. No blood, no remnant; no sign Zak had ever been there. The acid took it all.

He looked back on that time as he would a nightmare. Yet it seemed more real, somehow, than a place with a lofty eye of fire, where water fell in sheets, the tugging and lashing of air could bring down trees, and the sky climbed upward forever.

And now, even with the company of allies, the ill-drawn eras of his time in the Underdark shaded into one another. Also familiar was the feeling of slow, steady erosion. His thoughts came in a mangle of common and undercommon—hungry, must sleep, listen, _ichl suust, vlos pholor eairthin, z’klaen_ —and it was difficult to remember to speak aloud, to look back for his companions. Fighting—killing—broke the tedium, but spilled over into a dim, boiling fever of impulse and appetite; and afterward, he felt untethered from his body—he might have floated emptily above it, insensible of the wreckage in his wake. His surroundings looked false, sometimes, like some elaborate hall of tapestries that hedged him in on every side, their imitation a kind of mockery.

He listened to the water, drawn in by the immense sound. Closing his eyes, he could imagine he was standing at the mouth of a cave on the surface, near a river cascading down. And further out, beyond the cave's weathered lip, the deep night and low shelves of stars. The tundra, silent-swept and dark blue, rolling out for miles. It was a good thought: sustaining, in a way that few things were.

No other sound came. Perhaps Jarlaxle was right, that they had earned respite after hours of piling up corpses. In truth, he did not want an easy way to the city; an untroubled path meant hours with nothing to pull him from his thoughts, which grew darker as they neared the place. He feared that, seeing his homeland anew with an adult's clearer eyes and colder realism, he would understand it: find logic and necessity in the butchery.

He lingered there a while longer, then retreated to where Entreri and Jarlaxle took their rest. The distance between them, he sensed, was no idle spat, although both were close-mouthed on that point. Jarlaxle seemed encumbered, almost sullen, and as contrite as Drizzt had ever seen him—which was to say, not very. Entreri, for his part, was grim and cagey, and looked at Jarlaxle with steady, unalloyed hatred.

He wondered what they were. Demons—or illusions. If unreal, they were sculpted by a knowing hand, to allay even the suggestion of loss. And he, always skeptical, had been easily fooled: lulled into complacency, preferring to be deceived than bereft.

He put his back against the opposite wall and slid down to a sit, heels under thighs. They are not real, he thought. Several times, testing it. Every repetition dissolved like a chance pattern in dust; but he felt a measure of sadness, on the cusp of a greater grief. Strange, to miss them while they still seemed present.

Alarm skittered across his nerves. He looked up.

Entreri was staring at him. A face both familiar and not, being drow and potent with hate. His pulse thrummed in his throat. Recklessly, he opened his mouth to speak; but Entreri turned his face away and closed his eyes, dismissing him.

They are not real. It is an illusion.

He remembered the frantic hatred of earlier days: that hot edge where thought ended. It seemed now unimportant.

The hours drew on without anything to toll their passing; only the pressure in his skull, like a prisoned noise, unwholesomely growing. Sitting there, he felt a sense of inexorable progress—as if, even while they were motionless, the city dragged its vengeful bulk closer, closer.

 

* * *

 

Jarlaxle slept at arm's length. Breathing slack, serene. Artemis, sleepless, hated the sound, and imagined cutting that lying throat ear to ear. It had become a reflex, a talisman on a string. He would not do it, even if Jarlaxle meekly bared his neck and pleaded for the sentence. The debt was too heavy; such quick dispatch would be paltry coin for what he was owed. But he would enjoy it—enjoy listening, instead, to Jarlaxle wheeze and gurgle on his own blood as it bubbled out of the smile in his neck.

Artemis opened his eyes and leaned forward. Propped his elbows on his knees. When stretched, his shoulder throbbed a tiresome pain.

The air was indifferently warm, close, and acrid with dust. Every noise had several dimensions, splintered between out-thrust walls. He was used to the incessant seeping and dripping of water in unseen gullies. Echoes high and low. He wasn't used to the silence. Like a sepulchre, full of restless dead.

Acid-green light, leaking from the cavern, was stoppered at the tunnel's neck. A body slim in silhouette. Unaware of being watched, Drizzt put his shoulder to the natural archway; touched the sword sheathed at his other hip, seeming to reassure himself it was there. Blood dried in his hair looked like tar.

It wasn't Drizzt, Artemis thought. A good imitation, admittedly. He'd almost been deceived. But still—just artful mimicry; smoke and mirrors. A surface wrought by magic, which hid something malevolent and deranged.

If it was a demon, why hadn't it attacked? Sent to observe them? For what purpose?

And on its heels, the bite of realisation he'd kept at arm's length, a feeling more than a thought: Drizzt was dead, then.

He watched the creature rub tiredly at the outer corner of one eye. It made a slow way back down the corridor. His better impulse was to put his blade through Drizzt's neck, see what abyssal miscreation heaved itself out of the corpse. Instead, he feigned sleep.

Scuff of a boot-heel, as Drizzt sat cross-legged in the dust. Quiet followed.

He opened his eyes. Drizzt— _it_ —stared back, gaze pale and luminous through the gloom. Hatred boiled under his ribs, warring with something else. Nothing he could do. If he tried to harm it, Jarlaxle would cut short any effort to rescue Dahlia. He had no choice, apparently, but to tolerate it.

The gaze between them was like a tripwire stretched beyond its tensile strength: it was almost audible when he broke it. Staring at the insides of his eyelids, blackness mottled blue, he still felt the creature’s attention. No less brazen, but more dispersed.

He slept in broken intervals. Later, heard scratching. Opened one eye. Not rodents, nor rockfall; but quill darting intricately across parchment. In Drizzt's lap, black ink shone on the book's open face. The side not pressed upon splayed apart, revealing a density of pages covered front and back in Drizzt’s fluent, slanted hand. Subtle, this demon.

Drizzt paused. Worried at an ink-smear in the webbing of his thumb; but he was looking through his own hand, or beyond it. In his blankness, grief. Or a demon’s sham of human frailty.

 

“Here. Eat.”

He wasn't woken by Drizzt, but by Jarlaxle. Hatless, unsmiling, and holding out what looked like a piece of sediment.

He pushed himself up from his slump. His mouth was gluey and sour. “What is it?”

“Way-bread. It will keep you going better than a full meal. And quicker to eat. We should be leaving, now.”

“Fine.”

Until now, they'd eaten fresh food Jarlaxle carried in sacks: beef, smoked fish, liver and onion pastries, cheese, apples. This was less appetising. He took the way-bread and bit into it, half-expecting to taste sand. Found it wasn't much better. More like clay, lumpen on the tongue.

Satisfied, Jarlaxle raised his voice above the habitual whisper. “Drizzt.” No answer. Across the way, Drizzt stared at a point in the middle distance. Dread in his face. What comfort, to know that their lookout of the latter hours had been so _attentive_ to his task.

Jarlaxle sighed tersely through his nose, and went over. His approach drew Drizzt from the stupour, slower than it should have. They exchanged words, and a look passed between them, which Artemis couldn't decipher. Jarlaxle's hand on Drizzt's shoulder. Nasty, prying.

What Artemis felt, watching them, was not envy. Even if the creature _were_ Drizzt, he could think of nothing worse than to be the object of Jarlaxle's wayward regard. To be offered nourishment, but fed some slow and traceless poison. The feeling was resentment, merely. That their alliance had cost Jarlaxle nothing, and he everything. A scale tipped by such weight its two sides could not be balanced again.

No: they had never been. That, too, was an illusion: partnership, equal footing. Proper observance of boundaries, however illogical or decrepit. Once he'd believed Jarlaxle cared for him. But the coin of Jarlaxle's friendship was, in the end, no currency. A gold veneer on dross.

Drizzt—or the thing that wore his face—took the food offered and numbly ate.

They went on.

 

* * *

 

“Drizzt.”

Briza, her voice warped by distance and pulled long like a shadow. The words never mattered; it was her tone—the easy malice, spiked with excitement. She meant to hurt him badly.

He remembered just a handful of the beatings; a handful out of dozens, which was a sinister mercy. Only the most cruel or unfair kept any shape or shading in his mind. The scars left on him did not fade for many years: silver, mutilated tissue skewing back and forth across his spine like the edges of a shirt laced together; but the welter of violence that inscribed it went missing, and was never recovered. He thought that, even now, he did not understand—could not—what else had been taken from him.

“—not known her to so dislike a child—” Vierna, later, in the chapel. He could not clearly see her face, obscured by time like a fine layer of dust, but his memory had preserved the strains of consternation in her voice as she looked at the raw lash-marks across his forearm. The penalty Briza dealt out, for looking at her face. He had been confused and angry; for once, he had been looking at his feet. He did not understand, then, that the offence was of little import. The punishment would suffice when he no longer asked why he was punished. And Briza, of all his sisters, had known: she had seen the stirrings of disobedience in her House and resolved to purge it, while her mother rehearsed piety but bedded and birthed heretics.

When he fled she pursued him, found him, told him that he could come back into the fold—as if the false, syrupy appeal in her voice were not the darkest of threats; as if they had not cut out Zak's heart and burned it whole, to pay for his mercy; as if he had not damned them, damned Her, and run.

They were dead. His mother and father, his sisters and brothers, to a one. The city persisted, thrived, its ancient machinery well-greased with blood; but to his mind it was a pit-grave, cold and deep. And the derelict House—scorched stone, dust, rooms suspended in their vigil—was the only monument to their lives, save the child who sent them to slaughter for such noble purposes.

Yet they were not gone: his coming woke their ghosts, and they followed him down this path, restless, and speaking lines from his other life.

“Little wretch—” His head turned sharply with the slap, cheek hot. Before he was sent to Zak for training Briza had dogged his steps, ready to hand down arbitrary punishment, as though zeal and pain might fortify him against the onslaught of Zak’s blasphemy.

Zak, though, had not used force, except in the very beginning. Cruelty was a short-term measure, buying observance at the cost of resentment; and Drizzt was not a difficult child, except when left to fester in anger, growing contrary and wilful. In a short time Zak had discerned that Drizzt, unused to kindness, responded to slivers of praise as if they were immeasurable gifts: hoarded them, pored over them, sought them again. After that, all was lost: Drizzt loved him, and was gladly led astray.

“Better,” Zak said, and it was threaded with laughter, not malicious but fond. “That was better. Keep your elbow up.”

 

He found himself in the tunnel then, though he had never left. His backbone prickled, a cold sawtooth line. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He felt displaced by the passing of hours; yet the silence, unmoved, had congealed and spoiled the air. Afflicted, Jarlaxle said—demonic influence, or magical fluctuations; mind-sickness. It seemed more like clarity: seeing the true face of things.

Blinking, he stared at the tunnel's other wall. Every surface and mass was revealed as a cunning chain of black facets; it was order, opening out of the darkness. The edge on which his eye caught resembled a jaw preserved in stern outline, and an old memory rose up, piecemeal. Delirious after days of thirst and scant rest, he had wandered into a cavern where the stone seemed to change, bellying from shape to shape like clouds. It was grief's sleight of hand to show him longed-for faces in the unheeding stone, only to steal them again when he looked closer. Vierna, and Zak—

“ _Drizzt_.”

Jarlaxle stood close by, the bare curve of his head etched smooth and grey upon the darkness. By his tone, he had spoken several times.

“We must move on,“ Jarlaxle said, and touched his shoulder: kindness, most unkind. For half his life he had been touched with violence or not at all, and the ease of others was foreign to him, while he harboured instead the uneasy hunger of the long-starved and self-denying. He could gainsay what his eyes saw; but not the lingering print of a companionable hand.

Disorientated, he said, “Why did you bring me here?”

Jarlaxle frowned. “I have told you why. And you came of your own volition.”

“Yes,“ he said. Dahlia, the Baenres—the hateful joke of his ruined House remade, another revenant to haunt him. To drow, the dead were only worth remembrance if they could be a weapon turned upon the living. “I remember.”

His voice sounded insubstantial. Jarlaxle said, with rare directness, “What is happening to you?”

“Nothing,“ he said. “Truly. Nothing.”

 

* * *

 

Artemis kicked the burned carcass off the ledge. Watched it drop. Then darkness reached up and bore it down.

Fungi lit the rising path on one side. Baroque swellings from the stone: like tumbled rose-heads, glowing inwardly green. In that weird ambience he held the sword out flat before him. Murky, the blade, on either side of its central trench. The colour of spoiling blood. Tilted into shadow, its etchings became illegible; grimly suggestive.

Wielding the tool of his enslavement wasn't pleasing or cathartic, or any such drivel. He was repulsed by it. Became aware, now and then, of the tension spanning his shoulders and back when he looked at it. He was free—whatever that meant—but still braced for some outrageous pain, the ripping of nerves. He saw Alegni standing over him: well-dressed, massive, and pleased by his agony.

Six times, Alegni had killed him with this sword. Do'Urden couldn't know that; Jarlaxle surely did. The private horrors of others were the strings Jarlaxle used to puppet them, make them dance to other music. Never could resist.

It had been a long day—if it could be called _day_ , in the absence of light. Closer to the city, marauding demons grew more numerous, and more savage. Repelled by the Menzoberranyr, they were wounded and looking for bloodsport. Found it straying, stupidly, into their new territories.

Jarlaxle came to his side; sheathed Khazid'hea with an irritable sweep of the arm. “More and more,” he said.

Artemis hated him. And forced himself to put it aside, for the hundredth time. “You hoped for—what—a welcoming delegation?”

“Ah, one of these days,” Jarlaxle sighed. “It is rather tiresome being met by things that wish to wear my skin as an overcoat.”

Buzzing, from behind. Grown deaf to the noise after an hour of it, he heard it anew as it climbed in pitch, frantic. He turned. Further down the path, an insect-demon was squirming and dragging itself upon the ground. One filmy wing lopped off, the other crooked and broken. Drizzt stalked after. Stamped on its scrabbling arm, stabbed through its thorax, then cut off its head. Blood slid thickly down the blade, a red drape falling into ropes. He looked feral: mouth drawn up in a snarl, pupils blown-black.

“—an illusion can kill you if you believe in it.” Years ago, he couldn't guess whether Jarlaxle meant it as lesson, warning, or threat. Jarlaxle's thin silver knives, tearing windows in his cloak. Jarlaxle's armoured smile. Before Jarlaxle was led astray by lies and apparitions, and became that lesson’s cautionary tale. Before it all went to hell.

Now he pitied anyone who believed Jarlaxle was merely driven by the pursuit of power, or gold, or renown. Late—too late—he'd realised it was far worse. He'd been enslaved by a sword which desired only to consume. Had been consumed; felt teeth grind upon his soul, in some pitiless void where he hadn't eyes, mouth, limbs, voice. He understood that Jarlaxle, too, was empty. The core of him was a chasm ringing with absence—was huge and bleak and fathomless hunger, which would be satisfied with nothing; but would eat the world whole, and smile blithely through that labour.

And now, _still—_ for all his devices and cleverness, Jarlaxle didn't know falsehood when it was paraded before him. Or didn't want to, because it told him what he most wished to hear. His motives were always several, never singular: he needed Drizzt for some other end. Congratulated himself, heartily, on having manipulated another half-willing pawn to his advantage. A doomed hope, that the disaster with the shard might have taught him anything about magic with its own ends, and snares laid for blind, trampling ambition.

The creature would turn on them eventually.

Artemis's brain felt overheated, his thoughts steam lifting from a boiling surface. He saw his hands around Drizzt's throat, damming the artery. A brief struggle; the body going slack. It would twitch and fret like a hanged man. Memory ran jaggedly into fantasy: he had killed Drizzt once. Could conjure Drizzt's baffled shudder and the soft, severed breath as he died. In his mind, however, the corpse bore no visible wounds. Drizzt's face was a pale-lipped mask of itself, faintly beseeching.

Instead, he stood beside Jarlaxle, watching Drizzt stare down at the savaged demon as if it were a missive in a language he only half-understood.

“Shall we continue to pretend _that_ isn't happening?”

“If you have suggestions, I am all ears,” Jarlaxle said. “Suggestions beyond cutting him to pieces out of wrong-headed suspicion, I mean.”

“And if he moves against us?” Artemis said.

“Then we shall put him down, and drag him back to the surface,“ Jarlaxle said, definitively. “I will do the same to you if you try to harm him. As it seems whatever has got into him, has also got into you.” A beat. “Well, perhaps that isn't quite right. He is _differently_ afflicted—”

“I don't care.”

“I do, and I am making the distinction. If he does move against you, or us, it will be because he isn't in his right mind, and not because he has been replaced by one of Demogorgon's lackeys, or whatever insensible notion you're convinced of.”

With a sleep-walker's gait, Drizzt approached the edge and looked down the sheer cliff-face; took in the sightless chasm below. It seemed to hold him in thrall. The dry, white brushstroke of his hair, against that vast cup of darkness.

Jarlaxle said, so that the words wouldn't carry if Drizzt cared to listen, “It was always a risk, this journey. With him. Though I did not expect him to—deteriorate—so quickly.”

“If he kills me,” Artemis said, moving closer to likewise shield his half of the conversation, “I'll be gladdened to know, in my dying moments, that you considered the risk and summarily ignored it.”

“It was a considered guess,” Jarlaxle said. Sounded almost rueful. “On an unknown quantity. Of course he doesn't remember this place fondly...” His voice trailed away.

“Whatever _that_ is, I doubt it remembers this place at all. First time out of hell, probably.“

“By Lolth,” Jarlaxle muttered. Louder: “I hoped this bout of senseless paranoia, whatever it is, would pass quickly; but I see that was in vain. _That_ —is Drizzt Do'Urden, of your long-time acquaintance, who is plainly not well. If he were a demon, he would make a better show of coping than this.”

“Hardly,“ Artemis said. “It is showing you exactly what you wish to see. You wish to see him suffering, vulnerable, and so—”

“I wish no such thing,“ Jarlaxle said, brisk. “Obviously, I need him clear-headed for—”

“Oh, but no one is so susceptible to your predations as when they are mired in their own misery and horror.“

“My friend, I—”

“No,” Artemis said. The anger was never gone; came readily. “You do not call me that. You might as well spit in my face.”

“All right.” Jarlaxle raised placating hands, palm-forward. “All right.”

In the space thereafter, Artemis realised he still held the sword. Felt its hunger, gnawing without an object. He set the point upon the ground; rotated the blade. Its pageant of skeletal figures seemed to animate, jerking horribly in the low light.

“I was surprised that you gave it to me.”

“What?” Jarlaxle had half-turned toward Drizzt, stillness telling of some deeper thought; now he looked back.

“This,” Artemis said. With relish, twisted the knife: “I assumed you meant to use it.”

“Use it,” Jarlaxle echoed—but it was an echo late returning. “You believed I would—”

“Nothing is so reprehensible that you would not consider doing it, if it would get you what you want.”

“Artemis—”

“Don't call me that,” he said. Then he mastered himself. “Curious, that even as you claimed to be helping me toward freedom, you sought out ever more elaborate ways to deprive me of it. The day I was enslaved must have been gratifying for you.”

“No, I—”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“ _No_.”

A screech tore the air, like some awful bird of prey. Drizzt raised his head.

Artemis hefted the sword into a natural grip. “One day, Jarlaxle, I mean to repay you. For all of it.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Royuset” is Theebles Royuset, Artemis's mentor at the Basadoni Cabal. Artemis kills him horribly.


	2. way down we go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter came out darker and weirder than intended; see additional tags for content warnings. The "dubious consent" warning applies from this chapter forward.

The demon reared, its yellow eyes glowing like a cat’s in absolute blackness, and lunged for him. He side-stepped its plummeting bulk, and ducked under a wildly swinging arm. Then he raised his sword and, as it lay low, testing the air for his scent, he veered around and smote its open eye, plunging half his blade's length into the black core.

Next moment, he doubted that it had driven true. His hand was fixed above his head: there was the hilt, and—

There, the veining crack, where silver split the lens.

It bellowed, the wave of sound rattling him as if he were a cloth doll, and it surged up to its full height, lifting him from the floor. He felt his weight drag the wound wide until it gaped, a slit within the slitted eye.

Then blood ran out, hotly slicking his hand, arm, and every scaled surface. The smell was warm, putrid—meat turning in the sun; or birthwort in bloom—and he fought not to gag. Fleetingly, he saw his face reflected in the eye's glassy curve, which already grew clouded: long, dark, and emptied of feeling.

Below him the great jaws screamed and snapped, and he heaved himself up, away, grimly refusing his fatigue. His hand found a hold on the ridge over the socket as he kicked for purchase, kicked the eye as it jerked and turned, and stepped hard on the lower lid, boot slipping in blood. The sword had not penetrated far enough; he did not think there would be a chance to wrench it all the way out and aim again.

The demon arched and bit at nothing, tossing its head to throw him off. His palm burned—that was the blood, acid—and his grip weakened for a moment. As he clutched at the hilt, his view rolled and overturned; he saw the serrated floor rushing toward him, and braced. The impact was like a clap of thunder through his ribs and spine, and he cried out; but it was a glancing hit. He did not feel a crack. The demon, eager, as though spurred by his voice, dragged its head upon the floor and clawed wildly at its neck. Proof, he thought, that it could not see.

While the head righted itself, readying for another bout of thrashing, he firmed his grip on the sword. The wound was before him, red clutched in black, weeping. He decided not to tug the blade free, but mustered his strength and drove it deeper, turning it in its fleshy sheath and digging in, like shovelling wet earth. Gouts of blood and spume streamed out.

Screaming, snarling—such upheaval, he could not make sense of. He should have tumbled, but his arm was buried to the elbow, and numbing fast. The beast spasmed with colossal violence, clawing at its own face in fury and pain. It gave a tipping lurch: his hand opened, his fingers nerveless, and he fell away.

He hit the wall or floor, the air punched from his lungs in a shout, and rolled, careening down and down a slope of bruising stone—which gave way, finally, to some softer plateau. Dazed, he lay face-down, his cheek gritty and slicked with ichor.

The sand was warm and forgiving beneath him. In the absence of screeching, he heard a high, unbroken whine, cupped in his ears. The cavern seemed to be swaying, pitching, turning on an axis. His first breath hurt, front to back, his ribs like an iron corslet buckled by hammer-blows; but the next was easier. He groaned.

Vibrations, quick, and coming closer. It was still alive.

“ _Drizzt!_ ”

An ungentle hand rolled him over onto his back. Above him, the ceiling came into view, and he saw Jarlaxle’s face, stamped with urgency. It seemed terribly funny: he was laughing, giddy and pained.

“I'm all right.” The quivers of his breathing sent pain creaking through his upset shoulder, but it was not dislocated. He pressed the opposite hand into the joint as he sat up. His temple throbbed where his skull had struck the stone. “Only— _ah_ —bruised. Armour took most of it.”

Nearby, the hulking shape of the demon rose like a hill. Blood pooled around its head. It was dead.

“That was reckless, even for you,” Jarlaxle said, though his voice lacked the proper disapproval. He held out his hand.

Drizzt scraped blood and jelly off his palm on a nearby rock. His arm ached. “If we are protesting reckless decisions,” he said, gripping the offered wrist and letting himself be pulled to his feet, "we might begin at the beginning, with this entire expedition.” He felt light-headed: reeled, almost losing his footing. Jarlaxle steadied him by the shoulders.

“Then the idea is not to _compound_ that, surely.”

“Oh,” Drizzt said, dizzily. “I think you know better than to hope for that.”

 

They found a cavern in which to rest, some distance from the corpses of the demons they had slain, and a steep descent from the main passageway. It had no tenants but the long dead: grey, clean-picked bones lay in piles and strewn about. There were enough for several skeletons; and they were small, slender—like drow bones.

“Delightful,” Jarlaxle muttered.

It must be galling, Drizzt thought, to have to slog through the wilds and steal himself into a city where he had been, otherwise, an anointed vassal with a place in the throne room. He did not know what favour, if any, Jarlaxle still enjoyed, while he cavorted on the surface and kept company with humans, dwarves, and heretics.

There was quiet for a while, and the cavern’s deep belly hid them from thoroughfare above. They dug a shallow pit, hacked mushrooms off the walls—broad and flat, their undersides frilled like white gathered lace—and heaped them inside. Jarlaxle lit the stack with tinder. As Drizzt entered the cavern again, the residue of blood burned on his left hand, in the webbing between his fingers, and he almost dropped the armful of fuel he was carrying. Entreri, ahead, cast a wary glance at him, as if he were a wild animal yanking on its chain.

He was assailed, all of a sudden, by the memory of touching Entreri’s dark, naked back. The warm skin was under his hands, sweat-sheened and greasy with blood. He felt the twitch and pull of sleek muscle protesting the needle; and slight, whitish scars, like veins in marble.

No, he thought. Not that. He could not fathom why it had been preserved so completely, unless resentment was a kind of amber for things he would rather forget. But a soft, lethargic ache was growing in him, from the top of his throat to very low in his belly. And now he imagined—

His nape felt hot. He was ashamed. Was this a demon, or wild magic? It did not seem to come from outside him. So, then, it was a wild impulse, warped by strain, tiredness; threads crossed and knotted inside him. He did not want—

It was not even Entreri; it was a spectre that looked and spoke as he had.

But then, what would be the harm? And it had felt real. Felt—

He dropped the mushroom stalks beside the fire and sat down on his bedroll. He set his elbow on his thigh and pressed half his face into his hand.

They were not yet in the city, but already he felt it pulling him astray. In his mind they were descending into a chasm which drew in light, purpose, law, sense, hope—anything good or worthy—and milled it, indifferently, into darkness.

He watched Jarlaxle crouch and toss mushroom stalks onto the fire, then remove a few items from his pouch. The moving light cast Jarlaxle's face in warm shade beneath his hat’s wide brim. He did not know how Jarlaxle, who was clever and ambitious and delighted by things novel and beautiful, could bear to return to Menzoberranzan, having seen the surface.

At last, he said, “Do you go back often?” He was about to explain; but Jarlaxle nodded.

“More often these days.”

“Because of the unrest?”

Jarlaxle smoothed out the creases in his bedroll and sat, idly fingering the silver whistle hung around his neck. “For one,” he said. “For another, Baenre's matron has grown very ambitious.”

“Your sister,” Drizzt said. Quenthel, whom he had killed; but not enough, apparently.

“Yes, and no.” It was evasive—almost mocking, as if Jarlaxle took pleasure in flourishing information just out of reach. Always with Jarlaxle he felt that he was an unwitting participant in a game of sava, twenty moves deep and aware of an advantage only after he had surrendered it.

“You said that she was... different.”

His impatience must have seeped into his voice. “She has memories not her own,” Jarlaxle said. “Yvonnel’s, which are very old.”

“So she is—” Your mother. Odd, the thought of Jarlaxle as Yvonnel's son, her flesh and blood; as if Jarlaxle might instead have sprung from the ground fully formed.

“Quite.” Jarlaxle thrust one hand into the pouch at his hip and, incongruously, produced a bottle of wine. The label was off-yellow, its drow characters marred by stains. Dust muffled the green glass. “And I endeavour not to think about it, except when I must.”

He set the bottle down in front of Drizzt, signalling an end to the conversation. “I quite forgot I was carrying this.”

Drizzt raised his eyebrows. It was very convenient that wine had not been forthcoming when Entreri was injured, in pain, and ready to lash out. Even now, it seemed a fickle element to introduce: this truce was by no means secure. “Is that a good idea?”

Entreri reached across him, knocking his elbow—pain lanced up to his shoulder; but the other, stranger response in him was what made him freeze—and seized the bottle. He examined the contents skeptically, eyes flicking left-right as he read the writing, and said, “It’s the only good idea he’s had thus far.”

In silence, Jarlaxle prodded at the fire with the tip of his sword, sending up a spray of sparks. His lips had thinned; the flames put a mote in his fine, far eyes.

Drizzt watched him, weighing other questions. Jarlaxle, a Baenre. He had put it out of his mind, for a long time; and wished he could again. There were things about Jarlaxle he did not care to see, their friendship made possible by partial, wilful blindness.

“We have never talked about that," he said. Jarlaxle's gaze fell upon him, like the returning tide. He realised that he had not spoken the other half of the thought aloud. “About you—”

“Me?”

“Your family.”

“No, not since you spat it at me,” Jarlaxle said, mildly. “In future, I would thank you not to speak of it so indiscreetly. It isn't widely known.”

“How many _do_ know?”

“Gromph, of course. My dear brother.” Jarlaxle numbered them on his fingers. “Kimmuriel, who finds it all terribly amusing. Quenthel—would rather not know, I think. She was disgusted by the mere idea of familial association, and that was _before_ I allowed you to murder her. Tiago suspects, but in the absence of anything conclusive, he remains hopeful that I am no more than a distant and disreputable cousin. Artemis," he nodded at Entreri, who did not give so much as a flicker of an eye, “learned it by observation. And you—in the same fashion, I assume.”

“I guessed, yes.”

“When?”

When had he felt certain? “In Luskan,” he said. “I realised... that it was the only way you could carry on as you do, with their tolerance. Your mercenaries, your influence, your surface expansion—all of it—and they still haven't called for your head.”

“Ah,” said Jarlaxle. From his pouch he set out three wooden cups, one after the other. He uncorked the bottle. A cheerful glugging sound, as the wine was poured. Entreri took the first cup filled. “Well, they have—but it hasn’t stuck yet.”

Drizzt nodded. He could not feel surprised at that. “And I've met a number of your siblings over the years. You don't much look like Vendes, or Sos’Umptu.” Below the memory of those faces, in the same plot of ground, there was a dark thing interred: the Baenre dungeons, and his own long, light-gnawed shadow lying before him as he hung in chains. His blood grouting the flagstones. “A little like Triel. And Dantrang, perhaps. But I think, having met Gromph, it's him you most resemble.”

“Now, there's no need to insult me. You do know—”

“If he is as old as they say, there must be a good deal of magic involved. But then, how can I be certain that is _your_ real face?”

It was a poor joke—and his own melancholy weighted it down—but Jarlaxle smiled. “Amusing,” he said, dry as bone. He picked up a cup of wine and offered it in mute petition—yes?—and when Drizzt nodded, passed it over. Drizzt took it, held it, and ran his thumb around the rim.

To tell himself that he had Jarlaxle’s confidence was flattering, and naïve. He said, “Would you have told me?”

A pause, in which he waited for Jarlaxle to offer up a graceful lie.

Jarlaxle poured a third cup. The angle of his head put a deeper shadow over his brow and eyes; and his mouth was perfectly even. “No.”

Drizzt sat a little straighter, looking for a flicker of perfidy; failing that, any emotion not under the yoke of that terrific self-control. “Why?”

“It complicates things, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t need them to be simple.”

“I’m well aware,” Jarlaxle replied. He put the bottle down and sipped delicately at his wine. “That wasn’t my meaning. As you say, you’ve had plenty of encounters with Baenres major and minor. Many of them have tried to kill you, or torture you—or both. Thus, the name is not a pleasant one for you. Meanwhile, I was born of that House, yes, but I am not _of_ that House, you see—and I think it preferable that our association is not overshadowed by a cabal of nobles that resents me almost as much as it abhors you, and with whom I have precious little in common.”

“Strange,” Drizzt said. “I had heard that Gromph is the shadowy hand of power behind your family—and he reminded me very much of you.”

Jarlaxle smiled as though he did not know whether to be flattered or appalled. “Should I compare you to your own family? Would it be any more productive?”

Quietly, Drizzt said, “I was so at odds with my family that I killed them.”

Entreri had been content to ignore their talk, absorbed in thought; now he glanced up, over the cup in his raised hands. Drizzt could not look at him, and wished him gone. Yet Jarlaxle in a truth-telling mood was a thing too rare to be wasted. He supposed this was the price of candour.

Jarlaxle rubbed a fingertip down the bridge of his nose; and said, with great care, “That isn’t quite correct.”

Drizzt shrugged. “I didn’t put every one to the sword, true.” His voice was jaunty, strident; a poor front for pain. “But they are dead because of me, nevertheless. I don’t think the comparison is a good one.”

“All right. You were not like them—with one notable exception.”

“Yes,” he said, feeling unsteady.

“Likewise, there are a few similarities between my brother and I. But he is far, far crueller and stranger than I will ever be.”

Entreri’s derisive laugh was not quite lost in the hissing of the fire; but Drizzt nodded. It was a distinction he, too, had made. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, then forged ahead. “Did you ever tell Zak?”

There was humour in Jarlaxle’s gaze, and memory. “He knew. He didn’t like it—commoners, in particular, take a very dim view of House Baenre, and your father was never reticent in expressing his views, however impious or impolitic—but, yes, he knew. Perhaps it was that which restrained me from telling you.”

Drizzt narrowed his eyes. It was an unspoken pact between them: this was a card Jarlaxle did not play, even when he held no other aces, because his whole hand would be forfeit if Drizzt sensed impure intent.

Jarlaxle, though, was undaunted. “Sometimes I think you underestimate how much you resemble him,” he said, gently.

Drizzt almost recoiled. The sadness was sudden: black, vast, and rising through the gaps in his chest. Bleakly, he wondered that grief so old could feel new; but he had buried it before learning to bear it—perhaps he should not wonder that it was still restless. He ground his back teeth to quell it and looked down at his hands, fingers knit together. He did not want to meet Jarlaxle’s gelid curiosity, which regarded every slip of emotion as a specimen for study under glass.

When he looked up, at last, Jarlaxle was watching him with a faint, pressureless smile. He knew himself to be transparent; but if Jarlaxle had seen through him, he gave no sign. Drizzt was thankful for the reprieve.

They ate pieces of way-bread and meted out what remained in the bottle. It was a good vintage, and strong, reminding Drizzt of blackberries in late summer, dark and plump enough to rot. It did not even seem strange that Jarlaxle would bring very fine wine on a perilous underground journey beset by demons. Entreri took the greater share: Jarlaxle was too distracted to notice that he was being cheated.

Drizzt knew he could stomach plenty of the stuff, but at the bottom of his third cup he felt duller, and sleepy, his eyes a little swollen and his breathing dense in his ears. He rested against the wall, watching the stalks shrivel to flakes of ash as the flames gnawed and pulsed around them. His head had been twinging; now it was quiet.

“As we mean to move on in a few hours,” Jarlaxle said, setting down his cup with a crisp thunk, “it is long past time the two of you slept.”

Drizzt said, “I'll take the watch.”

“Artemis and I will take it.”

“I can—”

“No,” Entreri said, drowning him out. “ _He_ is a lying wretch—and yet I consider you the less trustworthy.”

Jarlaxle absorbed the insult without reaction, as if Entreri never spoke, and said, placidly, “That was quite a fall you took.”

Drizzt felt a cold creep in his breast that was a near cousin of fear. He thought: not Jarlaxle, as well. “Are you giving credence to his—”

“Of course not,” Jarlaxle said, harsh enough that Entreri, rebuked, seemed to become more dangerous in half a moment. “But I think it is an argument not worth having. What’s more, you need the rest.”

Drizzt was ready to press the issue, even at risk of Entreri’s fury; until something in him gave, and he had not the will. What did it matter?

It would have been wise to take reverie, lest another pack of demons happen upon their camp. Then fatigue pulled his limbs down. He went, pillowing his head on his bundled cloak. It stank of blood, but that was familiar. The tightness of his ribs was not quite pain, and a stray pang did not pull him back when he began to drift. He closed his eyes, and soon lay half-submerged in sleep, like a boat coaxed by the tide.

 

He was on the ground, where he had fallen. His body felt heavy and peculiar, slow to follow commands.

Zak stood over him. Alive—Zak was alive: whole and healthy and familiar, after all this time. It was a shock; yet he felt that it should not have been. They had been here for hours. It was the end of a long day, the lamps in the training room burning low. Shadows stalked about the walls, miming violence as if they, too, had attended to the lesson.

Zak was dressed comfortably for sparring, and seemed amused in the dim, close light. “I have told you before—“ His voice, deeper and indistinct, made Drizzt want to shake the water out of his own ears.

He took Zak’s hand and was hauled up. He thought they should be of equal height; but no, he was the shorter by at least half a head, and having to lift his chin to meet Zak’s canny eyes.

Briskly, Zak touched his cheek, turning his face sideways to look at his temple. There must have been a wound there—he could not feel it—because Zak nodded and said, “Just a graze.”

“Why do you always hit me on the head?” The words welled up from some obscure vein in him: this had happened before, exactly the same. He, a child, bruised and indignant; and Zak, already more involved than was proper. Mirth slitted Zak’s eyes; but Zak’s temper was a volatile element, needing only a little heat to ignite.

Letting go of him, Zak laughed. It was not entirely pleasant. “Only way it goes in.”

There was a neat downward slice in Zak’s shirt. Drizzt could not remember seeing a blade or making such a cut. His own hands were empty. He said, involuntarily, “What is that?”

Zak followed his gaze. “Ah.” He put his fingers through that opening and pulled, tearing it open. The cloth gave easily until it gaped, ragged, in the middle. Underneath there was a black, bloodless cavity, with only a blunt end of bone where the heart—

“It does ache sometimes,” Zak said. “But I am better off without it.”

“No,” he said. It was a struggle to speak—inertia held him like sucking sand—but he was cold, horrified, staring at that little void.

“I thought it cruel of you.” He could not tell if Zak’s expression was serenity or absence. “But, well—I should have killed you, after all.”

“Please, Zak—” Father, he wanted to say; but the word stopped in his throat, stifling him.

“Did you keep it?”

He looked down. The heart was clutched in his fist, beating sedately against the enclosing shell of his palm.

“No, No—I did not do this, I—” He held out his red hand to Zak. “Please—“

Zak’s face was changing. His skin had grown thin, illuminating the sharp scaffolding of bone underneath. Something gnawed a hole in his cheek, like flame tonguing delicately at a paper edge. The flesh peeled up, and parted into veined, translucent layers, the petals of a flower. There—the hard white crest of his cheekbone, bedded in wasting muscle. Drizzt felt a knot of feeling pull itself tight at the bottom of his throat: revulsion, tenderness.

Zak caught hold of his wrist, but did not take the heart. Drizzt’s hand was forced up to his mouth, cramming the heart against his lips. “Go on,” Zak said. He sounded bored.

“No,” Drizzt gasped. The heart was moist and slippery-smooth, like the silver side of a fish. Blood smeared his upper lip and a fat bead ran down his chin.

“Go on.”

He did not want to open his mouth. He could not seem to struggle. Next moment, his mouth was already stretching around it—wider, and wider, and wider, unhinged like a serpent's. Zak’s hand was impatient upon his hand, stuffing it in. He panicked, thinking his stretched jaw would surely crack.

Then the heart was all inside, trapped and huge between his teeth. With each awful beat, it flattened his tongue and swelled against the roof of his mouth. The flesh tasted of brine: the cold, rank winds of a city harbour; fish bloating and spoiling in the open air.

“Eat it all,” Zak said.

No, he wanted to say. Don’t, please, don’t.

He shook his head, until Zak held it still. The other hand was sealed over his mouth.

“You might as well.”

No, no, no—

He bit down. His teeth sank through, so smooth, as if it were butter. He tasted blood, salt, sweetness. He began to chew: slowly, gruesomely.

This occurred in silence. Zak’s face was grey and half-destroyed, like a grave-effigy time had wasted. It showed only the ancient disinterest of the dead.

He swallowed. Zak patted his head. He was still trying very hard to scream.

 

* * *

 

Artemis finished the piece of way-bread. It wasn’t improved by repetition.

Passing the watch over, Jarlaxle had been curt; scarcely looked at him. Artemis didn’t care, except that it revealed how the journey wore on all of them. Even now, Jarlaxle wasn’t resting, sat on a flat of rock at the other end of the cavern. No doubt trying to reach Kimmuriel, who steadfastly ignored his summons.

Understandable, Artemis thought. Although ignoring Jarlaxle had never done any good.

Drizzt lay half-curled on his bedroll. Not in reverie, but deep human sleep. Hadn’t moved in hours. Of course, monsters needed scant rest—so it was for show. Like the slips of emotion; the long, emptied-out stare. Nonetheless, it was disconcerting.

On the wall above Artemis's head, dozens of small parasol-shaped fungi cast a blue, cool glow. He was glad of the light. The fire had gone out, embers dim; and the darkness soon wore on him—he was human enough, still, to find it unnatural. Before he’d relaxed into normal vision, his eyes had been throbbing in their sockets. Queasy blots of colour welling up before him.

He kept his thoughts narrow. Let them stray—the sun’s thorny white heat at noon, or the painterly washes of sky at dawn and dusk—and the cavern shrank, walls constricting like a drawn-up purse. He felt the gigantic freight of stone above his head bearing down. Ready to bury him.

Claw was propped against the wall, but he couldn't be still; would have paced, given more room. The city was close. His dread made shadows on the back wall of his brain: the cage, the locked door, his smiling jailers—and the sword fed on all of it. He’d been a slave there. Hunting dog, unclean curiosity, fool in Jarlaxle’s court, body to be whored out. Chattel on Jarlaxle’s ledger. Of a certain quality, yes, but dumb goods all the same. He’d wondered, in very dark hours, if he’d followed Jarlaxle because Jarlaxle had mastered him in Menzoberranzan. Brought him to heel. Once a slave, always—

Stop it, he thought. He swallowed, furious, and rubbed his jaw—rough with stubble; last shaved some time ago. Looked up at the plants, the source of illumination. The light was steady, tranquil. It had no clear purpose.

In his case of vials and powders he carried tiny poison-pellets, firm enough to be held in the cheek without dissolving. A resort he hadn’t yet ruled out, if captured. Survival was the imperative; had always been the imperative. But there were things he would not tolerate again.

There—a noise he hadn’t noticed before. Water? No—it was sharp, compressed. It came and went. He cast about, one hand slipping to his belt.

Drizzt was shaking in his sleep. A fit? The same violence, and abandon. From behind, his spine’s curve looked tense enough to snap. One hand was clamped over his mouth; he was breathing jaggedly through his nose. That was the sound. As Artemis watched, he gave a lurch, like an absorbed blow. His head lolled backward, exposing his face to the light. Of his expression, Artemis could read only fear. Lucid, inward.

He had some thin notion that if Drizzt made any loud noise it would bring more demons to them. In truth, it was grim interest that made him approach. What he knew of Drizzt’s life—scraps, hearsay, assumptions—wasn’t quite the very image of bliss. Drizzt would have nightmares, which the demon knew. But why was it showing him this?

Standing over Drizzt’s prone body, Artemis considered kicking him; but couldn’t discard Jarlaxle’s firm edict against harm, which probably didn't permit him to break ribs. So he crouched down, and shook Drizzt roughly by the shoulder.

“Wake _up_ , Do’Urden.”

Drizzt murmured, “No,” and came awake. Knife in hand: seized from under his bedroll. The other hand, which shook, touched his mouth.

“You were thrashing,” Artemis said, as nasty as he pleased. He owed it no courtesy for not yet trying to kill them. “Noise we can’t afford, if you recall.”

Letting his empty hand fall, Drizzt began to sit up. Artemis moved forward; crowded Drizzt until he stopped. This close, he could see each white eyelash, and the tiny cuts on Drizzt’s cheek, and the faint crease appearing in his forehead. “Unpleasant dreams?”

Slowly, Drizzt looked at him. His eyes were glass slivers in his head. He intoned, “That’s not your affair.”

“Isn’t it.”

“No.” A tremor tugged at the corner of Drizzt’s mouth. Almost convincing, Artemis thought. “But—strange, that you should be concerned.”

“And if you bring every demon from a mile about?”

“Nothing will come,” Drizzt said, in a voice like he was speaking to himself.

Earnestly, Artemis wanted to cut his throat. Felt a twang of pleasure at the prospect. Not yet—but soon. “You would know.”

With hesitation, Drizzt touched his own face again. Pressed his fingers into the hinge of his jaw. His face bore smudges of dirt, like a child’s. “No,” came the reply. “I don’t.”

“What are you?”

Drizzt was mute for a while. Drew a fingertip across his lower lip, the motion clean and severing. “I couldn’t say.” He smiled, bizarrely. Sobered, just as quick. His expression, set apart from all Artemis knew, was not rational. He still held the knife.

Artemis loomed over him—it. Prevented it from rising. He was determined to see through the image.

Not long ago, he’d hated that drow were beautiful. Imprisoned in their city, enduring the sticks and stones of their scorn, he’d thought them monstrous. And more so, because they were also fair. Severely, pitilessly. Like jewels grinded to a slitting edge. It was oppressive: so few of them plainfaced, ordinary. Soldiers, commoners, beggars—the same ageless, imperious mien. A single note played again and again, with little variation. Predators, all.

Years later: Jarlaxle speculating, after several glasses of wine, that Drizzt might bear the marks of an ancestor’s indiscretions with a faerie. Artemis could see it. The strange, light eyes, adulterated with blue. The softer sweep of his jaw. Something prone and forgiving in it.

Jarlaxle had been joking, most likely. Had staked too much on Drizzt to muddy his heritage with other blood. But it was true—and clear, after Menzoberranzan’s pageant of a thousand drow who’d learned to play a masked game—that Drizzt’s face was a liability among his own kind. Lacked guile; betrayed itself in a glance. Beautiful, but not shaped for cruelty. Drizzt’s sister, Vierna, had the same look. Although the religious mania had been its own kind of disfigurement.

And this—this was false; but it was true to life. The demon looked up. Hooked Drizzt’s stare upon his. The sculpted corner of each eye, and the shadow cast by his nose, tracing his upper lip’s curve—more nearly legible than any book. Bore no subtle forger’s stamp Artemis could detect.

Ahead, Jarlaxle’s back was still turned. His cloak roiled with deep, poisonous colour. Oil on water.

This chance wouldn’t come again.

The demon lay flat as Artemis moved over it. The knife in its hand wavered, not brought to bear. Artemis caught that wrist; held it and pinned it above the demon’s head. Its body—smaller by an inch and ten pounds—gave a jolt when touched, but didn’t resist. The hand opened, the blade fell away. Clatter of metal on stone.

Under the thumb-bone, his fingertip found the stammering vein. The beat of blood fast and slight. He ran his thumb over the damp, spread palm. Traced this line and that, as if dissecting it. He was watching Drizzt’s upturned face.

Stoic, Drizzt wetted his lips. There was something wrong with his eyes. The fear of prey, and the fascination. The look in the deer’s eye, the hare’s, that was almost longing—before the arrow struck, before the claws came down. The arch of his mouth was dark and sheeny. Idiotic, to let his guard slip like this.

“What are you?” Again. Artemis realised he’d spoken aloud. He expected no answer.

Drizzt shook his head; murmured, low in his throat, “Don’t.” Against all good reason, he closed his eyes.

Artemis shifted his weight. His grip steeled on Drizzt’s wrist. His other hand went down: ran flat over the planes of Drizzt’s chest; descended the narrow ladder of ribs. Through cloth and thin chainmail, his palm cupped the ribcage’s under-curve. Felt the shallow swell, and sink, and swell, of air shunting in and out. His own daring made him bolder. He could do anything—anything—before he put this creature to the sword.

It would be no great effort for Drizzt to resist. Drizzt would have resisted. This wasn’t him.

Artemis bent down: close, and closer. Not more than an inch from Drizzt’s mouth, his own breath misted back upon his upper lip. He smelled dust, skin-heat, dried blood. As he breathed in, Drizzt’s eyes moved under their heavy lids.

He felt drunk. His blood hummed, his skin smooth and electric with possibility. A flicker of forward memory: the sense, as in a dream, that he’d already done what he was about to do. The gulf already crossed, and the sensation of meeting himself, on the other side of it.

His lips touched the seam of Drizzt’s: dry, brief, and almost soundless. They were both still.

Not for long: the shallow tilt of Drizzt’s head was as blatant as a drawn sword, his mouth opening to let Artemis deeper. There was no thought. Only—heat; a sour taste. Last night’s wine. Their open mouths met in little surges. Slow, at first, then ragged with haste; again and again, precariously—like skimming his thumb down the bare, thin edge of his dagger, knowing that if he slipped it would feed. Under his hands, Drizzt was as unpredictable as a snake.

There was something foreign moving in his brain and body. Not Claw’s horrible resonance, which was a struck bell tuned to an unearthly pitch. It was edgeless, and insidious. It plucked deep strings in him. The sensation was hunger—no, _starvation_ : blind and unfettered. His hands wanted to rip the organs out of Drizzt’s body, or crawl all over it. It didn't matter that this was an empty shape, not Drizzt himself. The likeness was enough. Take, rend, ruin: snarling in his skin. He couldn’t remember when it began. It had been growing for days.

This must stop. It is—

He lost the thought, or it was driven out by want. Drizzt’s clever fingers were flickering down his side, hip, flank; seemed unsure of his shape and weight. His spine felt molten. Brief skin-chills clashed with the heat of his body, like the prickling edge of a fever. When Drizzt tried to rise, hand scrabbling in the dust, Artemis shoved him down. The answering shiver, helpless and uneasy, raised gooseflesh on Artemis’s arms. He could do anything to it. _Anything_.

And Jarlaxle, not thirty feet away, was oblivious.

Doubt, again. He broke off. Between them, Drizzt’s breaths came in short, spiked rhythm. The dark face was empty: eyes closed, brow smooth, mouth wet and a little open. Artemis remembered—the two of them, in another time, arranged like this. Drizzt, blood on his tongue, choking tiredly as he died. Didn't pray, or plead. Looked at Artemis with dim reproach, as if he'd hoped for better. At the last, Artemis's own disappointment had turned red and mad inside him. Then he too was resigned. Their feud had ended, hadn't it?

No: it had never stopped, though he might have deceived himself. This was what he'd wanted: Drizzt in his power, disarmed and beaten beneath him. He found himself staring at Drizzt’s soft, slack mouth. The rich gleam of sweat on Drizzt's neck. An invitation blackly inked. Nothing could impede him, and he was far gone already.

He leaned down. Left, and lower. His lips glanced over the side of Drizzt’s warm throat, to where the blood ran nearest the skin. The head tipped up, obedient. Drizzt’s pulse ticked quickly against his mouth. He could see it: a mere knife-knick at the right angle to open the artery. The heart beats itself to death.

Lingering there, he wrung out a slight and unwilling gasp, lung-deep. Lifted his other hand to brush his thumb over the column of Drizzt’s windpipe; felt him swallow. Slantwise, he traced the throat’s curve down. Tasted salt on the skin: bitter, vulnerable. The knife was still within Drizzt's reach, but it was a threat far off. Or suspended. Everything had the logic of a dream. As he mouthed at the tender juncture between neck and shoulder, Drizzt shuddered—with no urgency, as if half-asleep. In his body the only tense line was the raised wrist.

Is this all it would take, Artemis thought. To bring him low.

From that angle, peering up, he watched pleasure seize Drizzt’s face and hold it. An uneasy conquest. Drizzt's pinned hand tried to make itself a fist, the tendon in the wrist taut as a viol's gut string. Artemis, pressing down, strummed his thumb across it. Then he rose. Drizzt’s mouth found his again.

Suddenly, he was thrown aside. Landed hard on his back where a rock jutted out, and bit the side of his tongue. Tasted blood, like rusted iron, inside his cheek. Drizzt, damn him, had righted himself in a convulsive instant, and stood with knife raised to throw.

Readying himself, he traced Drizzt’s line of sight, down the corridor, and saw—nothing. The same grey, razorous wastes they’d walked through for miles, hours. No unaccounted shadows on the walls. No shrieking, howling, or chittering. After the short disturbance of his fall, silence came down and sealed the air.

He sat up. Waited.

“What is it?” Jarlaxle was coming toward them, stepping quickly and easily between the floor’s pits and peaks.

“Nothing,” Artemis spat. “Unless we mean to fight the shadows, as well.”

“Did he attack you?”

“Evidently not—else he’d be dead now.” He stared Jarlaxle down. This was familiar: Jarlaxle trying to siphon even the leavings of truth off his face, as though Artemis were fool enough to betray himself.

Jarlaxle folded his arms. He was frowning. Prompted, “Drizzt?”

Drizzt turned his head. He looked weightlessly at neither of them, as if perceiving uncertain objects on the horizon. “I was mistaken,” he said, dreary. He paused. “A bad dream.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

Jarlaxle’s suspicion was plain; but he didn’t press it. “Very well.” He tucked the silver whistle back under his shirt. “Then I will bid you goodnight.” To Drizzt, he said: “Try to sleep a little.”

“Yes,” Drizzt said, lowering the knife. He looked lost.

They dispersed. Artemis climbed up into an alcove. Gained a better view of the tunnel, which tipped steeply on the other side of a fissure, like a drawbridge. He watched Jarlaxle sit back against the wall and bow his head.

Below the dark, still surface of his thoughts, he was aware of a tumult. Things crawling over each other. Half-fed, the hunger's violence hadn't abated. But the memory of what they'd done, minutes old, was already deteriorating. Like a dream burned off by light of day.

Drizzt lay down again, but didn’t sleep. He stared into the darkness for a long time.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon never addresses how Drizzt knows that Jarlaxle is a Baenre. It's not exactly Jarlaxle's favourite topic of light conversation. The first reference I found was in _Pirate King_ , so I dated it to that era.


	3. ghost and gristle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one took a while, specifically because of a middle scene that took a bit of wrangling to get right. It was written in three countries and probably contains half a dozen continuity errors.
> 
> More dubious consent; tags added for strangulation, discussion of forced prostitution/rape, emotional manipulation, and references to underage sex. Timeline-wise, this chapter takes place between chapters 10 and 12 of _Maestro_. 

He smelled blood.

They were walking through a long, uneven corridor. The stone was brittle and crumbling, and dust fell from the ceiling as thin red lizards skittered over it. Keeping pace with Jarlaxle—who looked at him, now and again, with concern—he realised that the scent had been there for a long time: metallic, bitter, and faintly obscene.

Jarlaxle was talking, in that low and careful tone that had become his habit in this place, about the regions through which they walked, and the comings and goings of Bregan D’aerthe in the Northdark.

“—somewhat active here. It is far enough from the city that it is not overlooked, and scouting parties do not come across it.”

Drizzt followed Jarlaxle’s eloquent gesture to a tunnel that showed signs of use: scuffed stone, faint tracks in the dust. “What is up there?”

“A trading post,” Jarlaxle said. “One of several portals to the surface we maintain. It is active twice a tenday.”

To the surface. Drizzt breathed in, sick with longing. “Where does it go?”

“Baldur’s Gate.”

He nodded. It was autumn in the world above, the light aged and yellow, the dry leaves like tongues of flame. He saw the chance before him, very clearly: to go no further, to get out, before the city reached into him and dragged out the shadow it had put there. Then he felt that chance receding, further and further.

He smelled blood. It was stronger now. There is no blood, he thought. There is no blood.

After the—the encounter with Entreri, sleep did not come again. His mind, all but empty, picked over the memory with the brute zeal of a scavenging bird, and in so doing worried it to pieces. Lying in the dark, arousal prickling his skin, he felt Entreri’s humid mouth on his lips. The slick, slow path down his neck, and the raw cut of teeth. Entreri’s palm smoothing over his side. Entreri’s hand on his wrist, grinding it into the dust. They were like burns that kept their heat after the branding iron was taken away.

Jarlaxle said little as they collapsed the camp, impatient to leave. He had a meeting to keep, with a contact bearing information about what they would find in the city. Who, he would not say—evidently, his contact was not a member of Bregan D’aerthe, but drow and almost certainly noble, disagreeable to Drizzt and Entreri both. Or perhaps it was a demon. Drizzt did not think he would be surprised.

Not a mile behind them lay the five corpses of the only demons they had seen for miles, swiftly dispatched. He was still warm and restless from that fight, wishing there had been more to kill. Killing was never more simple than in the Underdark. He faced a beast stood twice as high, its teeth like great needles and brightly frothed with venom that could numb him head to foot in half a minute; and the gauze of his confusion fell away. He was sharp and honed and certain, an arrow loosed in a high, clean arc toward its target.

As the ferment of the fight wore off, doubt stole in, and dug deep trenches. His body felt foreign to him: it might slip through solid walls, or fly apart, or move of its own antic will. He found himself touching the marks Entreri had left, which lay in hot and humming constellation upon him: a faint bruise under his ear, another at the top of his shoulder-blade, scrapes and scratches on the back of his hand. They were proof; of what, he was not certain.

He did not understand. Entreri hated him. Entreri intended to _kill_ him, and would try as soon as their present task was completed. Entreri had held him down, and he, feeling unreal, had let Entreri do it, waiting for the blade to descend with a peculiar absence of dread. Yet when Entreri bent to kiss him—how absurd, he had thought, and might have laughed, even as his heart stamped in warning—he was not unwilling. There was nothing kind in it, nothing tender, only lust; but he, forgetting place and time, forgetting that the dark was closing around him like the sprung jaws of a trap, shivered under Entreri’s hands, and let Entreri lip and bite roughly at his neck.

He had hardly thought of Cat when it happened, or after. It was late to feel guilty, and he did not even feel that. Rooting around inside himself for the bleak and stinging shame that should be there, he came up empty-handed. There was nothing. Why?

Because that was not Entreri. And this—he glanced aside—was not Jarlaxle, however canny and colourful he seemed. They were not real. For days the suspicion had been growing, and what had been formerly a chaotic, throwaway notion was now as close to certainty as he might know. They were well acted, his companions, but there was a veneer of falseness upon them. And his surroundings, too: painted boards in a pageant of someone's devising. Was anything true or permanent here? If he were killed, would he wake somewhere else, unscathed?

What did it mean, if none of this was real? What had happened—

His mind retreated from that, turning blank again. There were impressions, images, that were not quite thoughts; his brain like markless vellum, impervious to ink. He put one foot in front of the other, again and again, giving himself over to the movement. He grew calm.

 

“—have a _plan_ for our auspicious arrival, or does this entire venture hinge on happenstance?”

Hours had passed. He looked up, coming to a stop at Jarlaxle's side. Entreri had returned from scouting ahead, sword drawn and shiny-wet, visibly riled by a recent kill. The sight of him seemed dream-touched, distant, but Drizzt felt the cold thrill of threat unfurl across his back.

“I have a plan, yes,” Jarlaxle said, brusquely. The two of them squared off. “This isn't a blind venture.”

Entreri’s red eyes were unblinking. “Really.”

“But, inevitably, our immediate course of action will depend on the intelligence I receive once we get there.”

“Which means 'no'.”

“It means exactly what I have said. The city is in disarray. What was true when we set out might now be obsolete. It's a matter of adaptation. Of all people, you—”

“Whatever you are about to say,” Entreri replied, quietly, and the cavern seemed too small for the two of them, and his fury, “I suggest you do not say it. If I ever possessed any insight into your methods, I've endeavoured to forget.”

“It was a _number_ of years I spent in your company.”

Hard enough to break teeth, “More fool me.”

“If you say so,” Jarlaxle said. He looked as though he might say more, but his voice sloped down, relenting.

Drizzt looked past him, to Entreri. The sharp and volatile face, wrought in black, was no more forgiving than it had ever been, and no older than when they had faced each other in a light-flooded tower, with Jarlaxle close at hand to see that one of them fairly murdered the other. That memory was a cloth of holes more than stitches: some of it he could repair—Cat’s story, looking on from outside the tower, had given him thread to work with, where he had only scraps—and some of it was lost. One piece, however, was not diminished, but remained in tact at every layer, though it had no seams, nothing to join it to anything else. Entreri’s hand, neither solid nor spectral, sinking through his chest—impossible, wrong, and the most vivid thing he had ever felt.

Dying a second time had not been like that. After the shock of the blow swung through his skull, it was like wandering on the edge of sleep; a vagary now dusty and abridged by his memory. Lying in the snow, he had been too tired to shiver, staring into the yawning, sour sky as his eyes misted over. The land losing shape and sense, and his heart slowing, slowing.

His sleeve felt heavy. He held it up before him, to find it soaked through with blood. His wrist must have been cut in the fighting—perhaps a claw, slashing under his sword-guard. But the pain came so late, and without urgency. The wound inches below where Entreri’s grip had been.

He put his hand over it, wadding the wet fabric, and pressed down. The sting was cold, and clean, and sweet. Real, if only fleetingly.

 

* * *

 

Jarlaxle had arranged to meet his informant—carefully chosen, that word—in one of Bregan D’aerthe’s outposts, currently unmanned. Nothing to do, _of course_ , with the hot-spring in the adjoining cavern. In some ways, Jarlaxle was astonishingly predictable.

Artemis couldn’t help but sneer when Jarlaxle told them, but wasn’t opposed. It was the eighth day, by Jarlaxle's count. He was conscious of his skin, its rind of sweat. The sticking thickness of his hair. Tiredness cased his body like plate metal.

“I need not tell you to keep your weapons by you,” Jarlaxle said.

“Then don't,” Artemis said. He wasn’t above pettiness.

The two of them bartered, tersely, for the watch. He refused to trust Drizzt, who was either an imposter or unhinged. He agreed to take it, having extracted from Jarlaxle the promise of four hours' rest before they set foot in the city—where all hell, no doubt, would break loose.

He sat on the flat of a broken stalagmite, watching Drizzt and Jarlaxle pick their way down. From above, the water was blackly opaque. Currents marbled the surface, and churned up clots of foam like salt.

“How far?” he heard Drizzt ask, voice scratched with disuse. Every hour Drizzt grew quieter.

“A day,” came the reply, “or a little more.” Their voices were enlarged by the basin of rock into which they were descending.

“You mean, depending on how much,” a pause, “resistance we meet.”

“Quite. Although the worst is now behind us.”

“I don't think that's true,” Drizzt said, without inflection.

They parted. Immediately, Jarlaxle was obscured by stone spines. Drizzt, wraithlike in a shroud of steam, crouched on the other side and put a testing hand into the water; then wandered on, and was hidden.

Artemis leaned back, braced himself on his hands, and stretched his neck. The heat rang his head like four fingers of whisky. Near the waterline, fire lichen growing out of fissures in the stone glowed in pulses. A grate of embers; a tavern in late evening. He found the red dimness restful. Could have drowsed there.

Jarlaxle returned first. Reaching the top of the slope, he looked as clean and composed as if he’d spent four hours in a drow bath-house, oiled and stroked and scrubbed by slaves. Bathing had always put him in a reflective mood. Evenings in Heliogabalus: after washing Jarlaxle would sit on the sloped roof of their apartment, facing the dying rim of light at the horizon. Even sunsets in the Bloodstone Lands were grey and meagre, but Jarlaxle watched them with interest. Sometimes Artemis had joined him up there. The smell of soap and sweet oil; Jarlaxle’s warm, inciting grin. Years ago, when they were still—

Seeing Artemis, Jarlaxle’s brow creased. Suddenly he was solemn, and poised to speak. There was a story Jarlaxle meant to tell—had tried to tell, several times, when he detected a chink in the stone wall of Artemis's hatred. Seemed to believe it would make amends: impossible. Artemis gave him no such opportunity, dropping from the rock, shoving past him without a sideways glance. He wasn’t a fool. Jarlaxle’s remorse was counterfeit. Jarlaxle would sell him for a song, given half a chance.

Below, a towel and a clean slice of soap-cake left in clear view. Taking both, he reached a place where pocked fists and fingers of rock afforded a barrier, if not actual privacy. He unbuckled the sheath at his hip and left the sword leaned upright. Light inlaid itself thickly upon the red arterial stitching of the gauntlet. He peeled it off.

Master, or slave? It had roamed at the edge of his thoughts all day. Jarlaxle’s voice, sometimes rousing, sometimes a jeer. Now it cut through the idle matter like a razor. Master or slave? As if it were so simple. As if the sword had not been used to— _no_. Nothing useful came of that—of following the thread to where it snarled up with pain. Knots beyond his ability to undo. It was enough to have borne it once. Nothing to gain by reliving it.

He permitted himself a moment to hate Jarlaxle again, deeply and fully. Remembered the sculpted emptiness of Jarlaxle’s face, like a coin, when the Netherese took him. The last surviving of his debtors, and the most debted in account.

It wasn’t safe to fully undress, but he removed several pieces of armour. Loosened his undershirt, rolled his sleeves to his elbows. He felt the protest in his shoulder as he bent his arm. Dying pain, not hot or sickly. That was well: no fester in the wound. And if it did go bad—he thought of sliding his dagger into Jarlaxle’s side. Imagined the stillness of Jarlaxle’s terror as the blade glutted itself on him.

Given what he knew of Jarlaxle’s soul, it would probably rot the wound all the faster.

Descending into the seething water, ankle-deep, he found it almost scalding. He scrubbed himself, soaped and rinsed his hair, and splashed his face. At times he forgot—was surprised by—the perfect blackness of his skin. More troubling: the image of his body—slim-limbed, smooth, almost hairless—wasn't the shape of his body. The outline of his hand didn't map the flesh. His scars were invisible. Hair on his wrists ran obliquely against the rise of bone, felt but not seen. He didn't know whose body he wore. He’d given the mask no name.

As he climbed out, he felt eyes upon him. He didn't reach for the dagger close at hand, but went on briskly drying himself with the towel. Put on the rest of his armour, and the gauntlet. Took up the sword and buckled it at his hip, where it hung heavier than its weight in steel.

He trudged up the slope. Nearing the top, he heard Jarlaxle exclaim aloud: might have been elation, or a curse. He was intent upon a conversation Artemis couldn't hear, silver whistle in his hand, fine chain looped around his fingers. Kimmuriel, wherever he was, had finally broken his silence. For all that Kimmuriel claimed independence, he too was caught, endlessly drawn back into the ambit of Jarlaxle’s influence.

Loathing, long-lived, glowed in Artemis's gut. These _wretched_ drow.

Drizzt sat a few feet away from Jarlaxle, uncloaked and newly clean. His shirt-collar was askew. His hair, darker at the crown where it was damp, fell forward in sheets, softened the line of his jaw. Cast in shadow, the halves of his face looked disjointed. One eye a blind pit, the other white but deadened. As he went closer, Drizzt murmured, “Entreri,” then turned away.

Strange, still, to hear that name. He'd gone without it for years, because he was someone else's man, not his own. A slave, an instrument, a sword in Alegni's hand. A beast kept on a short leash. His pride had been ripped out of him, or he’d ripped it out himself; no use for it, when he was ruled. So he'd made himself cold and hollow. Forgot his other life. Attended to the rhythms of ugly, bloody work. Killed for coin, as he’d swore he wouldn’t again. But he kept his anger, which ate every insult, wracking agony, and humiliation that bent his neck. Bitter sustenance, scarcely enough to live on. And each time Alegni killed him, there was less to bring back.

Like a ghost, the rumours had said of him. Across Neverwinter, and further. A ghost, haunting Neverwinter Wood, and belonging to the Netherese.

He looked up. Jarlaxle was walking toward them, tucking the silver whistle into a pocket. A grim afterlife, this, he thought. What was freedom, but one master exchanged for another?

“I have spoken with Kimmuriel,” Jarlaxle said. He knelt beside the heap of his belongings and began to sift through it. “He is in the illithid hive-mind—which is no great surprise.”

“Would that he stays there,” Artemis said, all venom.

Jarlaxle raised an eyebrow, making a show of it. In years past he’d met Artemis’s rage with mild reproof. As though he’d hoped for better, but resigned himself to such coarseness. Artemis had found it annoying. Now, the presumed familiarity revolted him.

“No,” he muttered.

Jarlaxle’s face shed all expression. For a sickening moment he thought Jarlaxle meant to apologise, and the fury that filled him was in some parts self-directed. That he was here, having to listen to this creeping, lying filth.

Then Jarlaxle took up the thread of conversation, as if it hadn’t dropped. “He would like nothing more, certainly.” Brisk, easy. “And it is the safest place for him.”

“Then why leave?”

“I have need of him, so he will come.” Jarlaxle’s voice grew stiff, pinched where it rose with cheer. Even before the calamity—for which Gromph held Kimmuriel responsible—there’d been strain between Bregan D’aerthe’s two captains. When Kimmuriel tried to assassinate Jarlaxle in Calimport, Jarlaxle gave him control of Bregan D’aerthe. Praised him for initiative. What manner of offence earned him Jarlaxle’s distrust?

“But he will be of no use on this journey, I assume.”

“No,” Jarlaxle said. “He will not set foot in the Underdark. We spoke on that point at length. He is immovable.” There: anger in Jarlaxle’s uncovered eye. He was protecting Kimmuriel. He wasn’t pleased with Kimmmuriel.

“Because Gromph will kill him.”

“That is a concern, indeed. Gromph always _was_ fond of vengeance—it is a particular talent of his—and, rightly or no, bears Kimmuriel a great deal of ill will. Kimmuriel is not willing to risk a confrontation.”

He followed the line of Jarlaxle’s stare to Drizzt, who hadn’t moved. Seemed not to hear. Jarlaxle said, with care Artemis thought feigned, “Has he spoken to you at all?”

“No,” he said. Jarlaxle nodded, gravely. It irritated him. “It is a _demon_. We should have killed it days ago.” But he recalled with pleasure the body straining under him. Drizzt's breathing, faint and quick. Drizzt’s mouth, a phantom of heat, tongue, teeth. It wasn't Drizzt, no—but lifelike. A monster with an agreeable face, to be slaughtered when it was no longer useful.

“He is confused,” Jarlaxle said. “It may be necessary for Kimmuriel to examine him, should he deteriorate further.”

Irrelevant. It would be dead in days. “And Dahlia?”

“He will help her, if he is able—if she isn’t beyond help, an eventuality for which you should be prepared.”

Something wound tight snapped in him. “I didn’t ask for your counsel, Jarlaxle, nor will I _ever_ have need of it. Keep it to yourself.”

“Very well,” Jarlaxle said. He took up the rest of his belongings. Knotted his pouch to his belt. “I will meet the two of you in the north corridor,” he said. “I shall not be long—an hour, no more. According to Kimmuriel, it is a clear run from here to the city.”

“Fine,” Artemis said.

Jarlaxle said, his voice reaching, “Drizzt?”

“An hour,” Drizzt said. Didn’t lift his head. “Yes.”

Jarlaxle sighed. Left without another word—which was well, because Artemis had no desire to hear him speak more than necessary. The air between them was already crowded with the unforgiven, and the unforgivable.

He breathed out when Jarlaxle was gone from sight. Leaned against a stalagmite, ripped a hank of black grass out of the dust, mouthed a vehement curse at the ceiling. For a time he paced. Stopped to listen for the telltale shriek of demons chasing them down. Hearing nothing, went on pacing. He didn't wish to think about the destination. A place where he'd felt first discouraged, then desolate, then naked and unmade.

 

Drizzt’s eyes were upon him again. When he met that scrutiny, he thought Drizzt would disown it. Glance away when caught, at least. No—Drizzt’s gaze dragged over him, avid and unfeeling. Anger filled him, as fast as fire breaking down a door.

Three paces took him across the cavern. He stood over Drizzt—who looked up, slowly. Throat offered in mute surrender, like a dying man asking for the knife. Drow seemed far smaller from on high.

The first contact was glancing, almost incidental. His curled finger nudged the high crest of Drizzt's cheekbone. Then his knuckles sketched the warm, delicate slant from cheek to chin, which drew a self-conscious flicker of the eye. He was pleased by it. His whole hand cupped Drizzt's jaw, and he idled his thumb across Drizzt's dry lips. They parted a little.

It is an illusion, he thought. Permissive because I wish it.

His touch grew deliberate. He traced the shape of Drizzt's mouth, which had cursed him, mocked him, damned him. Felt Drizzt's breathing quicken, and pressed smearingly down on the lower lip until it opened. His thumb slipped inside. First, an impression of heat; then the tongue’s live, agile flutter upon his thumbnail. His thumb rode upon the ridge of Drizzt's teeth, testing one fore-tooth for sharpness, before sliding forward. Drizzt lowered his eyes, and his tongue flickered, hot, along the thumb's underside, then around it, sucking gently. Lack imitating want.

Relaxing his wrist, Artemis let his thumb slip out a little. Then he pushed it deeper in, until his nail grazed the back of Drizzt’s throat. Watched the throat clench as Drizzt fought not to gag. Drizzt’s teeth bracketed the joint, where his thumb spread to meet his palm. Each torn breath plucked at him, rushing damply over the back of his hand. It looked filthy, humiliating, but Drizzt offered no protest. Kept his gaze down. Good, Artemis thought. He was dizzy with this small potency.

Through his neck and wrists, his heart was a constant, staccato presence. Rapid, then subdued; and in all things violent.

He tugged his hand back. Savoured the slick sound, and the clumsy bob of Drizzt’s head. Drizzt stared up, mouth wet, lax, faintly ragged. He seemed confused. But the slope of his shoulders spoke nothing but compliance, his hands slack on his thighs.

“Get up,” Artemis said.

 

  
“No.”

“My friend,” Jarlaxle said, lavish emphasis rendering it hollow, “I must be frank with you, that there is not really a choice.”

He could see Jarlaxle’s office, as it was then. Not a glut of trinkets and frippery, but almost sparse. A silk rug, royal purple underfoot. Books shelved on every wall. Glass lamps housing white fire. On the wide desk, an assortment of parchment, inks, quills, and knives. Jarlaxle leaned against it, turning his gold signet ring on his finger.

“I have already refused, _friend_. Don’t try my patience.”

“If you refuse, she is well within her rights to kill you—and me, by the way, if that is any bother.”

It wasn’t.

“Because you own me.” He could barely say it. He was furious.

“From her point of view, yes, you are property,” Jarlaxle said. “And it is fortunate that she believes I own you, else she would not even _ask_ permission.”

He didn’t recoil, outwardly. Jarlaxle would enjoy that. Wanted nothing more than an unwilling reaction. If information were coin, every secret mined from him Jarlaxle priced in gold, and hoarded. The hope of future profit. It was indecent, that fascination; and dangerous. Yet it was the reason Jarlaxle kept him alive. Jarlaxle’s greatest adversary, it seemed, was boredom.

He felt himself caught. To struggle would only tighten the net. Jarlaxle, looking on, seemed captivated. Amusement lit every line of his clever face. Artemis wanted to put out his eyes.

“She'll not harm you,” Jarlaxle said. “Her request is… not unreasonable, given her station, and her status as our current employer. But the arrangement will, of course, be forfeit if she damages any, ah, _property_ of the company.”

“You cannot seriously expect—“

“I do, I’m afraid.” There wasn’t an ounce of apology in his voice. “I expect you to be pragmatic.”

“No,” Artemis said.

“Then do, please, be reasonable.”

“Reasonable. This is not _reasonable_.”

“You will enjoy it.”

“Shut up.”

He didn’t want to look at Jarlaxle. He turned. Paced to the other side of the room. There were few windows in this safehouse, which was hollowed out of a wall in the Clawrift. This room looked out over the rift itself: above, the city lights lay in broken halo; below, darkness, black upon black, wide as famine's mouth. Hypnotic, like a harbour perched on the sea at night.

Jarlaxle chose to move without making a sound, but he felt the approach. He kept looking out of the window. Gripped the window-sill until his knuckles stood out. His breathing was laboured. The lights blurred. From a distance, he regarded his own horror.

Jarlaxle touched his shoulders. He did flinch, then.

“Come now,” Jarlaxle said, quietly. “It will not be as bad as all that.” I am an animal to her, Artemis thought. No drow stays her hand for a beast. “And it will keep you alive another day.”

“What is that worth?” he said. Listless, his voice fell to a level with Jarlaxle’s. He almost believed, momentarily, that they were conspirators in this—and Jarlaxle, his jailer, didn't delight in watching him rattle the bars of his cage.

“Why, everything.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” As though it were obvious, even here. For the sake of self-salvage, suffer any depravity. Was that the lesson? What, then, was there to salvage?

“I assure you,” Jarlaxle said, “that every soldier, every lieutenant in this company has had to do such things.”

“And you?”

He felt the aura of Jarlaxle's smile, close to his cheek. “I have done what I must.”

“I am not like you.” Empty. A last resort: “I am not drow.”

His heart was bitter in his mouth. If it must be done, he wished it over already.

“Yet you are here. You wanted to see the city, did you not?”

Artemis didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell whether he was being mocked.

Jarlaxle said, finally, “Come. This way.”

   
* * *

 

Drizzt stood—and in observing himself, he was reminded of a construct unfolding blandly under a command word. His jaw ached. The surfaces of his eyes felt dry, and he found that he could not see well. In low light the cave moved in and out of focus, billowing like the bottom of a stream: nearer, farther, crumpled, flat.

When Entreri hit him, he barely felt the sting in his cheek. He could have stopped it, but he took the blow without a sound, face turned aside. His body did not seem to belong to him. He turned his face back, and Entreri hit him again.

“Tell me to stop,” Entreri said. He did not reply. Another slap.

“Stop,” he said. Another, much harder. Perhaps Entreri could sense that he did not mean it. The pain was clearer now. It was more real. He did not immediately lift his head, concentrating on the hurt, and the glug of blood in his ears.

While he was distracted, Entreri stroked back fine strands of hair that had fallen before his face, and tucked them behind his ear. The gesture was almost tender, and loathsome, because he was being toyed with.

Entreri said, “I cannot decide if you are very clever, or very stupid. He would not offer himself like this."

“Wouldn't I," Drizzt murmured. Entreri thought he was a demon; and he felt like one—like something that had crawled out of a pit, cringing at the light. Entreri, lit from behind, seemed no less dark, with shadows in full bloom around his eyes and at the edges of his face. In his expression there was hatred, near-fanatical; and with lurid clarity, Drizzt saw the same look lit by sunlight. Calimport, the open street, hot as the blood on his lip, and Entreri rousing the crowd to kill him.

“Why are you wearing his face?”

“It is my face,” Drizzt said, quietly.

“Liar.” In another time he might have laughed at this coming from Artemis Entreri, a consummate liar in another man's skin.

Instead, he said, “What are you going to do?”

Entreri was angry, he saw. He had always thought Entreri’s eyes cold: now, they were hot as the lash of summer lightning, that could turn the world red with a touch. Entreri’s hand lingered at his cheek, a naked threat.

“Be quiet.” Entreri’s voice was so low, the vowels almost swallowed, that Drizzt felt rather than heard it. He had been about to speak again, but found himself silenced.

The knuckle of Entreri’s ring finger drew a light, thoughtful line down his neck. As a silvery tremor darted from his nape to his tailbone, the hand gripped his throat, long fingers pushing up under the lower bladed bones of his jaw, and he breathed in.

“Clever, I think," Entreri said.

“If it is,” Drizzt muttered, “and you aren't deceived, why would you...” He thought Entreri must feel the heartbeat humming under his hand.

A sly, slow smile stretched Entreri’s mouth, showing edges of teeth. It was Jarlaxle’s smile. He wondered if Entreri wore it consciously. “I take opportunity where I find it."

Entreri leaned forward, and mouthed at the tip of his ear. For a moment the shock displaced every other feeling, a blank thump of electricity to the middle of his chest, and he went rigid. _Oh_. The scald and wet pressure of Entreri’s mouth was almost unbearable. He moaned, unsteady. The sound canted between the walls—and was crushed by Entreri’s hand cutting off his air.

“You will be quiet,” Entreri whispered, “or I will _strangle_ the life out of you, and tell Jarlaxle that you attacked me, unprovoked.”

He glared. With a sleeper hold, Entreri could put him out almost instantly; this grip was too crude, and tight as an iron vice. At first he thought it jest; but Entreri did not relent, watching him with that poisonous half-smile as his chest grew tight, and tighter. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He did not resist: he wanted no clemency from this man, and Entreri would not kill him—could not, being an illusion. Yet it was convincing: light swelled and burst across his eyes, and the four edges of his vision began to collapse. Sore from want of air, his lungs seized against his ribcage. He tried to cough. Soon he felt himself shaking, a thin whine rising in his ears, higher and higher, and his vision shrank until he could see only the drow face, cool against the dark—

The hand let go. His first gasp for air rattled like water on the lungs, a great artless heave of relief. He sagged. Entreri held him up by the waist, and said:

“I am not allowed to harm you—so says Jarlaxle—otherwise I surely would.”

“You'd try,” he rasped.

“Wretch.” Entreri shoved him against the corridor wall, and pinned him there. “Fortunate, that you won't show bruising.” As he struggled, still coughing, the air rawly scraping in and out of his throat, Entreri unlaced his shirt, then worked down the line of silver clasps on his armour, unfastening them one by one. With a yank he was exposed from collarbone to belly, his skin rising in gooseflesh. Entreri’s eyes, darkly red, slid over him.

“It is a very good illusion,” Entreri said, reaching out to touch the pale silver scar which curved from his left breast to the lowest rib on his right side—like a sickle, or a seam of metal through stone. Three fingertips traced it end to end, lightly. His skin had never felt so thin, flushed with heat. “I gave him this.” Down, down. “Do you know that I killed him?” He remembered Entreri’s hand on— _in_ —the bloody ruin of his chest; the agony of being carved open many times by his own sword.

His mouth was dry. He swallowed, with no little pain. “Yes,” he said.

“What are you?”

He could not answer. I was dead, he thought. And then, the thing he had not allowed himself to think: I died, and there was nothing. Darkness, heavy, an uncompromising weight upon him—then nothing at all. Later, he woke again in his body, which was lying on a pallet in a tower with walls like glass. He remembered the wincing light, the molten gouts of sun falling over his shoulder and the bedsheets; remembered shivering in the heat, achy and very cold from loss of blood. He found himself tact, his lungs swelling easily with air—no blood clogging his throat, welling into his mouth—but when he took account of himself he still felt an absence. He had carried it since. After Luskan, it cut a deeper chasm. And on Kelvin's Cairn... the elation of finding his friends alive, weighed against such emptiness. It was there now: nothing, nothing, a dull horror; and he, wretched, waiting for the world to fold and crumple and darken like paper staining.

Entreri did not expect an answer: he cupped the base of Drizzt's skull, seizing a handful of hair above the nape, and pulled sharply, forcing his head back. Pinpricks of pain lit all over Drizzt’s scalp, and as he tried to resist that grip Entreri’s mouth fell upon his.

He was held there, Entreri licking greedily into his mouth, breathing as if he had run for miles. Numbness peeled off him like an old skin. Soon Entreri’s hold eased: the hand sifted through his untied hair, which made him shiver. He was solid where Entreri touched him—and sickened, in equal measure.

They parted, and Drizzt kept his eyes closed.

“Look at me.” At his hesitation, Entreri touched the base of his throat, a strangling grip threatened by arched thumb and forefinger. He opened his eyes. A drow with Entreri’s face looked back.

“Are you not pleased?” Entreri said. Nearness leached his features of meaning: his red eyes were obscure, except that they were vicious. "You told me, repeatedly, that I am just like they are. And now—”

“No,” Drizzt said. He tried to force Entreri back, but was bullied against the wall, forced to stoop to avoid a sharp overhang. Entreri, leaning on a hand beside Drizzt’s head, put his mouth where his fingers had been, and sucked the skin between his teeth. Swallowing the sound at the top of his throat, Drizzt wished for a bite to break the skin where it was already livid with bruising. The impulse was new, and confused; but it only grew as Entreri’s fingers, peeling back the edges of his shirt and armour, circled his nipple, circled again with a skim of nail, and scratched it, unkindly. He twitched.

Entreri’s face turned up, and watched him. Another little scratch of the finger; a pinch. As he breathed out, Entreri’s mouth caught his, tongue slipping between his lips. There was stubble on Entreri’s jaw, invisible to the eye but coarse upon his lip and cheek. In the grip of rising heat, Drizzt had to close his eyes. It is not real, he thought. None of this is real. A hardness pushed against his hip—his mind shuttered—and he broke off to gulp at the air.

Sensing resistance, Entreri stroked a hand down his stomach. It came to rest over the shape of his cock, cupping him through the fabric, and he could not prevent his grunt of surprise, the slight jerk of his hips. “Mm.” His breeches felt tight, the weave a shifting scratch where he was sensitive; and now Entreri’s thumb rubbed there, slow and coaxing, as if soothing a nervy animal.

He could not think. He saw redness whether his eyes were closed or open, and his mind swam in the shimmer of it. When the heel of Entreri’s hand kneaded down, the answering throb was so full and sweet that he let out an airless “oh,” before Entreri cruelly drank it from his mouth.

Entreri’s other hand followed his spine to its lowest notch, where his back hollowed, and touched the swell of his arse. Drizzt baulked, breath shuddering from him. As the touch idled down, his face twinged with the clench of his back teeth. He knew what Entreri intended by it: something he had not done before, and understood only in the abstract. There had been nights in the Academy dormitory when he saw shadows contort on the wall; heard thick, starved breathing, the hush of sheets, throttled groans, and the slapping of flesh. Sex used for currency, for barter; or for humiliation.

He was drawn into another kiss. His lips felt swollen, and his neck throbbed with the stippled bloom of finger-shaped bruises. Strands of hair were coiled damply across his forehead and throat. He could not remember where he was, or why. He was hot through every inch, all the feeling in his skin, at the very surface; there was no space for anything else.

Entreri caught his lower lip between his teeth, and bit down, inciting a bright burst of pain. He felt keenly that Entreri wanted to draw blood, and that expectation was headier than pain itself.

The next shove pressed him flat to the wall, their hips brought flush, and another throb lanced through his belly, straight and sudden. Entreri held his waist, controlling the rocking of his hips as he met every short thrust with as much force. Sex was not unfamiliar, but this was: he felt naïve and ungainly, chasing that surge of sweetness. Faster: they were rutting.”Gods,” Entreri breathed, nosing blindly at his temple. His fingers clamoured for purchase, and he raked them up Entreri's back, tugged at Entreri's short hair, then pressed them into the stern lines of Entreri’s shoulders, letting them fan out over the leather.

It did not last long. He was sighing nonsense, in common, in drow: bits of sound, half-protest, half-demand. Feeling came in convulsions, rising like a tide, a tumult. He let out a sob of air, his head sunk to rest upon Entreri’s shoulder as they moved, and the ache, cresting, rinsed him white and clean of thought.

He came back to himself in the sweltry, souring dregs of it, drooping as if drunk between the wall and the body that caged him there. Entreri, driving forward in vicious pulses that made him feel hollow, too sensitive, groaned beside his ear, a word, broken and breathy, and slackened against him.

For a few moments more, Drizzt had an illusion of movement—though they were both still, panting into the heavy quiet. Sweat was drying, clammy, on his skin; he felt an unpleasant dampness between his legs. He could not understand what had just happened. The giddiness inside him might have been laughter, or, lower, the urge to vomit. He had a sense of something malevolent drawing closer. Or perhaps it was already inside him, and beginning to stretch its limbs.

Entreri wrested free of his unconscious grip. Drizzt looked up at him. Just then, with a red glow at the rim of his red eye, and his skin gleaming, and the tips of his white teeth bared, he looked like a demon.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drizzt has “died” three times in canon (I think): (1) by psionic-kinetic rebound in _The Crystal Shard_ ; (2) explosive strike to the head in _The Pirate King_ ; and (3) blood-loss (?) in _The Last Threshold_. It's fair to say that death is almost narratively inert in the series at this point. Anyway, for the purposes of this story Drizzt doesn’t remember (2).
> 
> In _Charon’s Claw_ Artemis casually reveals that he was required to have sex with drow priestesses while he was trapped in Menzoberranzan—or, as Berellip Xorlarrin puts it: “he was brought to Menzoberranzan by Jarlaxle […] and graciously put at the disposal of those of us who were curious about the prowess of a human”. It’s not addressed again. For whatever reason, rape is a motif RAS uses repeatedly in Artemis’s story: either literal rape (his uncle, and later the slaver he's sold to; Arunika in _The Last Threshold_ ; several drow priestesses), or a figuratively equivalent physical violation (Kane taking control of his body via magical “intrusion” in _Road of the Patriarch_ , Alegni likewise in the _Neverwinter_ books). I wish RAS would quit it, but I don't think he knows he's doing it. Still, it seemed relevant and significant that—even if it was forced by the situation—Jarlaxle’s control of Entreri, while Entreri was his prisoner, also extended to sexual control. While the recent novels are very interested in rehabilitating Jarlaxle, for most of his life, Jarlaxle has not been remotely nice.


	4. for all that die in us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now marked as “AU”—this story has nothing to do with _Hero_ , which I think some people have already read. It sounds _wild_. 
> 
> The original draft of this chapter had, uh, even more weird sexual tension between Jarlaxle and Artemis. Apparently it's unavoidable.

The path wound to the left, and to the right, and left again. It veered down. The air was humid, almost greasy with steam rising from a hot lake below. Artemis could hear water falling.

“Here,” Jarlaxle said. He wasn’t looking straight ahead, or down, but at the wall. Hidden by the hang of shadow, there was an opening. It was large enough to slip through, if one was crouched. Artemis halted.

“A few hours,” Jarlaxle said, “no more.”

“Fine,” Artemis said. Their eyes met: it was like the horrid clashing of metal. Jarlaxle sighed—ah, the consequences of his own treachery must be so very _tiresome_ —and looked away, discomfited. A grim smile plucked at Artemis’s cheek. Hadn’t Jarlaxle taught him to take pleasure where he found it?

Drizzt, lagging behind, came to a stop. He glanced between them with only faint attention. He’d been mute for hours. Perhaps the demon sensed that it had erred.

Artemis waited for both drow to go through the opening before following. Once inside, he put himself against the far wall. The chamber wasn’t large—but if it brought the drow too close, it also put them within a weapon’s reach. He tapped three fingers upon his sword’s hilt. Let himself drift, but not far.

 

“And then?”

At this time of year, the light was miserly from dawn to dusk. Night had drawn in. Pressed damp, black fingers at the windows.

The apartment was bare, and cold. The furniture—of Jarlaxle’s choosing—would arrive tomorrow; but Jarlaxle had been impatient to move in, and so they had. They spread bedrolls on the flagstones in what would be the kitchen. Jarlaxle conjured bedding and pillows from—gods knew where. Artemis built a passable fire.

A draught touched the bare stripe of his neck. He pulled the wool blanket closer around himself. Jarlaxle, sat on a pillow, was draped artfully in another blanket. His hat lay on the floor beside him, and he was coiling the long feather around his finger. The small movement caught Artemis’s eye: round and round.

“He tried to kill me.”

“Well, naturally. And—tell me—how far did he get?”

“Halfway across the floor.”

“Halfway! Most impressive. I’d have wagered no more than ten feet.”

“Then the poison took effect.”

“Oh?”

“Went down like a stone,” Artemis said. “Spat a few interesting curses at me, while choking on his own blood.” He saw again that face. Helpless, furious. “Profitable and educational.”

Jarlaxle laughed, full-throated.

Artemis felt the edges of his mouth turn up. The smile was like something he’d trapped. He reached for the flask of mulled wine between them, and sipped from the brim. It was sickly: too much sugar. Spices—cardamom, cinnamon, ginger—masked the chalky bite of cheap wine. Jarlaxle had bought it from the market, probably because it was expensive. Difficult to come by, spices. Scarce in the northlands—like all things. This place was inimical to the kind of abundance Jarlaxle sought, but he seemed to find it anyway.

Recovering, Jarlaxle took the flask from him. “It’s fascinating, how often people underestimate you.” He drank. Touched his thumb to the rim of the flask. Drank again. “And to such detriment.”

Artemis shrugged. “Useful.” He took the flask when it was offered.

He felt Jarlaxle’s regard, which pried as much as flattered. He was guarded, still. But he was thinking about the warmth settling inside him—tentative, strange. Not trustworthy.

This was Jarlaxle’s great talent, by which he thrived. The fascinating light in his eyes, the smile with hooks in, the way his face always intimated a secret without ever disclosing it. He drew people, effortlessly. Like lodestones to a pole.

Artemis, too, had been drawn. Why else was he here? Thousands of miles from Calimport. Damara was a wasteland. Scrub and ice. Heliogabalus, a city of beggars and bloated aristocrats, ruled by a zealot. Jarlaxle saw something in this place, beyond grim and dangerous faces, but had not deigned to share it. And still, even when kept in the dark, Artemis followed him blindly. For all the insults Artemis tossed at him, only one of them was a fool.

He felt sour. Had been swayed, somewhat, by Jarlaxle’s good cheer; but now his mood was turning. This was a familiar pattern when he considered his situation. More so, of late—which was the flute, he believed. Pulling up roots; old, buried things. Things that had rotted and festered. Things he couldn’t begin to wrestle with. He felt erratic, lurching from one incoherent feeling to another.

“Useful,” Jarlaxle echoed. “Ah, you are much more than that.”

“I’m not susceptible to flattery,” Artemis said, flatly.

“My friend,” as if wounded, “I have _never_ flattered you.”

“When you flatter me,” Artemis said, speaking over him, “invariably you _want_ something.”

“What else should I want, but the pleasure of your company?”

He stared. Before Jarlaxle laughed—that crisp, hearty laugh—he thought Jarlaxle’s face seemed earnest.

They drank, and ate. Jarlaxle had stocked the pantry, and they ate their fill of wastel bread, smoked salmon, and a sharp cheese with a black rind.

Sensing his low resistance, Jarlaxle asked for the story of how he’d broken into the Daosiin vault. He no longer wondered how Jarlaxle knew his professional history—every employer, every mark, every theft and trick. It was an open book, apparently.

Daosiin, one of the most difficult contracts he’d ever taken. He was twenty-one when the missive came. A cramped, nervy hand; fine parchment. His employer was an old man, who’d supped on every rumour of riches beyond imagining; grown greedy, then stupid, fearing for his position. Artemis was an assassin by trade, not a thief, but he hadn’t paused to wonder if he could do it. Break into the most guarded vault in Calimport.

As he brought it to mind, the place spread out before him. Built in the city's old style, with an architect's lofty genius: dozens of arched corridors, a maze of cool white stone, with the great vault in the centre. He remembered devilish traps, false floors, golems with glittering eyes. It had been a marvel, which he’d not stopped to regard—when he was young, the work was everything. Everything he was or could be. The rest was irrelevant, or weakness.

He disturbed nothing in his passage, and came to the vault unhindered. The honeycomb ceiling was tiled in glazed green and deep blue. Under it—coins heaped high in every direction, like dunes of sand shining at sunset. He let his hand skim over the steep side of a pile, sent coins clinking down the slope in a spill. He was young enough, then, to be excited by all that gold. For all the riches lavished upon him, poverty had deep claws. He’d lived on coppers and thrown-away scraps. But his employer had warned him of the forbidding magic laid on this hoard. And the object he was tasked to retrieve was much rarer.

He went to the raised dais, where he found the jewel-box, locked. Pin-and-tumbler lock. It took a long time to pick: the pins were heavy and grown stiff with age. As he manipulated the metal pieces with two thin picks he listened for any sound. Golems, or something else. Then the lock gave a soft click; he lifted the lid.

Set there, as described: a thin gold band, with a teardrop sapphire as large as an eye. Deep, peerless blue. He felt a heat through his fingers as he plucked it from its setting. He knew not what power it had. He certainly wasn’t idiot enough to put it on. He rose, and found his way out.

His employer was delighted. Paid him handsomely for the item.

Three days later the old man was dead. One of his sons, the rumour said. That same son, executioner or not, met his own end within the tenday. Artemis had felt neither guilt nor surprise. So it went in Calimport. The old man had hoped to fend off the threat of ambition. But a weapon was only a boon until turned upon its wielder.

Jarlaxle was fascinated. Artemis was not a story-teller, had not one-fifth of Jarlaxle’s flair for it; but he told the tale, voice low and burred with the late hour, and Jarlaxle listened, as if gripped. Looked thoughtful, still, when they settled down to sleep.

 

Later, Artemis was woken by an owl crying out as it flew over. Opened his eyes, looked up. The window was latticed and curtainless, the moon’s light raked thin by cloud. The fire, low, gnawed on a log burned almost to feathery ash.

Jarlaxle lay close by, breathing softly and deeply. He was dreaming: now and then his eyelashes moved, and expressions passed over his bare face—no hat, no eyepatch—without settling. He looked smaller. Almost harmless.

Artemis didn’t move. Watched, for a while.

He didn’t hate Jarlaxle. What had been hatred, after Menzoberranzan, had burned itself out over the years. A savage flicker, now and then. When Jarlaxle bartered with his life. Disregarded his anger. Kept him in cages and laughed at his helplessness. For the rest—it wasn’t hatred, or even curiosity. It was a kind of rawness: a feeling of exposure, but to heat and cold naught to do with weather. It betrayed a freight of feeling that was a surprise to him.

I should hate you, he thought. I _wish_ that I hated you.

He looked up at the window; tried to guess the hour from how far the moon had sunk. When he glanced back, light glinted sleekly over Jarlaxle’s open eyes. He went still.

Jarlaxle smiled. Seemed untroubled by being watched as he rested. “Artemis,” he said, his voice dusty with sleep. “Are you all right?”

Caught off guard, it took Artemis a moment to find words. “I’m fine.”

“Bad dreams?”

“No.” No dreams he could remember.

“Good.” Jarlaxle’s fingertips skimmed the back of his hand, too quick and surprising for him to react. “Then do try to sleep. Much to do tomorrow.”

Wasn’t there always. But his thoughts caught on that brief touch and the—fondness in Jarlaxle’s face. Had it been false, he might have understood it. Something twisted in his chest.

He got up to put another log on the fire, the blanket still heavy around him. The room had warmed. As he lay back down, Jarlaxle turned over. Made a low sound, moved an arm under the blankets. And smiled.

No, Artemis thought. _No_.

Jarlaxle disappeared. The bedding, Jarlaxle’s cloak, paper wrappers, dishes, wine bottle—those too were gone. It was an empty room.

I am asleep, he thought. Then: I want to wake up.

 

He felt the surface of the dream somewhere above his head, like a roof of water, and surged toward it. It was difficult: his limbs felt leaden.The stuff of the dream, heavier still. He broke through. Found himself sitting on rough ground, surrounded by implacable stone on all sides. As the walls pressed in, he remembered where he was.

Already the dream was scattered, and vanishing. Against his better judgement, he reached for it. It eluded him. Last to disappear was that picture: Jarlaxle, in the dark, smiling up at him.

When he was awake, dread was a cold, high wall inside him, blocking any view of the city. Beyond it his mind would not go. Waiting for sleep to come again, he watched the two drow through half-open eyes.

Jarlaxle was reading a sheaf of papers. His thumb rubbed at his lower lip in thought; old habit. Artemis hated its familiarity. A round, conjured light hung beside Jarlaxle’s shoulder. To the left, Drizzt sat cross-legged as if taking reverie, but stared down at his open hands in his lap. Artemis’s eyes were drawn to the taut line of his neck. Looking for bruises.

_Wretch_. As he’d pinned Drizzt to the wall, he’d felt heavy, inevitable. Drizzt’s forge-hot skin; the smell and bulk of him. Drizzt’s face, blankly savage.

Master, or slave—Jarlaxle’s voice—again, and again. The only thought he could recall.

Artemis closed his eyes. Behind the quiet, there was a roar.

 

* * *

 

Once, he saw his mother alone in the chapel. On every other occasion, she had been flanked by one of his sisters, or an attendant. She came at least twice a day. She always led the House in worship. On that day, however, there was no one else, and he mistook her, at first, for Maya.

She did not know he was there. He was often forgotten about, knelt for hours in a corner to clean a minor statute, or wash the ceremonial cloths in the stone basin in the side-chamber. That morning, he had been punished for raising his gaze—Vierna was not Briza, and would be satisfied with a slap or a sharp rap to the head, if only because whipping him kept her longer from her studies—and set to cleaning all the silver in the chapel.

Some artefacts he was not allowed to touch, because he was low and filthy in the eyes of Lolth; but those were locked away, and he had not yet managed to open the lock on the cabinet to look at them. He had been sitting on the step with the knife laid across his lap. It had a black hilt, with thick jointed legs like a spider’s splayed around the cross-piece. The blade was longer than his hand, and heavy. He had not known what it was for. He had thought it was only for show, like the statues and the jade symbols, and cleaning it another menial task with no purpose but to teach him obedience.

His mother’s hair was pinned up. Black jewel-pins winked as the candlelight touched them, but loose strands were falling down at her nape. She was not in ceremonial robes, or one of the high-necked gowns with silver stitching on the bodice, worn for ceremonies and holy days. It was a simple green dress. Her throat and wrists were bare. Her soft shoes made no sound on the floor.

As Malice went forward, to the statue behind the altar, he leaned around the column to watch her, weight tipped forward on one knee. He could not do otherwise: he understood that she was the centre of the House, the place from which all power and intention flowed, and to which it returned. Her will was everywhere, it animated all things; but he had looked upon her so rarely that she had a kind of unreality in his mind. In the flesh, she looked young, barely older than her daughters—and beautiful, in a way that was not kind. Her brow was pinched with tiredness.

Malice knelt down before the statue and laid her hands flat on her thighs. She stayed there for a long time. He had seen his sisters prostrate and reverent before that statue: they did not speak to it, only murmured prayers as if they were afraid to stop. Malice, too, was afraid of it; but her back was straight, and she was looking up at its awful face. It seemed daring, almost a demand, as though she were waiting for something promised to her. Not her true face, no—but it was naked, in a way he had never seen before.

She had never loved him. He had been a kind of instrument in her hands: beaten metal, thrust into the fire. If it bore scars, if the forging was imperfect, what did it matter so long as the blade would cut? He had been shaped for killing; he had escaped, but even a century later, he had not escaped the purpose for which he was made.

 

He was not aware of his mind turning. A darkness flooded in and washed the world black, like ink spilling across a page. He was in a different place: no light, and rough walls sketched in grey on all sides. He saw Briza lurch toward him, mouth drawn up in a snarl.

Then her face was bloody; she was staggering backward. His raised hand held a sword. He looked down: two of her fingers lay on the floor, clean-cut, like stones.

 

There was a crash: not outside, but inside his head. He did not know if he was falling, or had already fallen.

“Drizzt.” He was shaken by the shoulder.

“Hm.”

He was sitting down. He felt the wall at his back. The heavy pulse in his skull made him feel sick.

“Open your eyes.”

The darkness parted. They were in the training hall, and the strangely prosaic light of the lamps parceled the chamber into shadow and yellow. Zak was knelt in front of him. Zak did not seem to be angry but his face was blurred and strange.

“What mistake did you make?”

He blinked, feeling stupid. The words were there, but only as unstable shapes; they kept writhing away from him. Mistake—what mistake—

“What did—” The thudding behind his eyes ate into the sound of his own voice, his loud breathing. He was so dizzy. “What—”

Zak gave a passing, private smile; the most rare. “I think we are finished for today.”

“No—I can,” it was difficult to speak, “I can go on.” He did not want Zak to leave. It was a feeling like standing on the edge of a ravine, looking down. A terrible fall; a loss.

“You are concussed. I will take you back to your quarters.”

“Zak—”

“Don’t argue, Drizzt.” He never did—not with that voice.

He could not remember the walk through the House, except for the faerie fire, which looked like broken threads of light; and Zak’s patient hand on his back, steering him along. There was the door to his room, so familiar that he knew the ridged shape of the lock from twenty paces, even as his vision welled with strange colours; and there was his bed, and the stiff mattress stuffed with dry stalks, and the book Vierna had given him about the wars with the surface elves, open to a gruesome illustration of a drow captain stabbing a faerie through the belly as it reached for him. The faerie looked mad and horrible. Its hands were like claws.

Zak sat him on the edge of the mattress and looked down at him, eyes appraising and uncommonly gentle. “How do you feel?”

“Tired,” he muttered. His head hurt very much, the pain burrowing in above his ear.

Zak took something from his belt, and put it on the bedside. “Chew those for the pain,” Zak said, and touched the side of his head with a warm hand. “I will look in on you in a few hours.”

He did not recall lying down; he woke to the ticklish slide of his hair under his chin. The pillow was bunched and lumpy, and he was sore. He blinked at the lines of his room as they arranged. Zak was not there. It was late: from the window he could see Narbondel in the distance, its light very low. He got up, and went out into the corridor.

There was no sound. There were no servants on the stair down to the kitchen, though surely the family had just taken the evening meal; nor anyone in the washrooms. Clothes were soaking in a wooden tub, but no one was churning or scrubbing them. Someone had left darning on a chair, and a spool of black thread had rolled onto the floor. In a workroom, two hands of cards lay face-down on the wide table, beside a pair of cups. He went on.

At the foot of the main staircase, he saw blood splashed up the wall, and in a long spray across the floor, but he could not see a body. The other wall had been smashed, bringing down part of the ceiling in a heap of rubble and dust. The dust in the air made him cough.

On the steps, more blood—streaks and smears and puddles—and an arrow-head. The broken shaft was further up, and crusted with blood. A sword lay on another step, wet and dented. He thought he knew it.

The doors to the chapel lay open. One of them was buckled on its hinges, with deep scars gouged in the stone. When he touched it, he found it hot. He did not want to go inside, but could not seem to stop. He looked down at himself. There was blood on his raised arm, and the front of his tunic.

Just beyond the threshold, Maya lay on the floor. Her face was empty, her dress slashed and sticky.

There were other bodies. The low benches had been broken and overturned. Some of the tapers were still lit, and by their light he saw the dead.

Briza was slumped beside a pillar, head bowed. Her belly had been cut open. He saw the red of her insides, glistening, jewel-bright. He thought to pause there—he had feared her, very deeply, and now she was dead—but then he saw Vierna.

He knew her by the shape of her head and the way she wore her hair; he could not see her face. The sword still protruded from her back. It was his sword. She had tried to crawl away on hands and knees, and collapsed. He knelt down beside her, and turned her over onto her side, her head heavy in the crook of his arm. The sword-hilt scraped the stone. There was such pain in her face, but her eyes were closed, in a haggard likeness of sleep. Blood had dried in a crust around her mouth. It was strange to touch her—his hand was bloody; both hands—and he thought that he should weep, but horror was stealing through him like a shadow. He saw the sword slide in; he heard her gasp. He laid her down, and rose, and went on.

The altar and the stone before it were cracked. Malice lay on her side, one arm outstretched. A studied pose, reworked in nerveless clay. Her throat had been cut, the neck of her green dress starched red. Underneath her, blood had spread like a banner. He felt that he had intruded on something private: defeat—the transformation, sudden and irrevocable, of the frightful ruler to a silent shell. He looked for remorse in her face, for anything less cruel than what he knew; but there was only thwarted fury.

He went toward the altar, then, knowing what he would find. In the silence his heart slammed at his breastbone like something buried alive.

There was a lot of blood. Zak was cold, and had been for a long time.

Where was the heart? Burned, already.

Zak’s eyes stared up, too empty even to accuse. He did not know what else to do: he closed them, gently. Then he let himself touch Zak’s hand, the nearer one.

He was cold. The tearing sensation in the soft part of his chest was unspeakable.

He thought he should bury the body, where it could not be found and violated. But Malice was dead; they were all dead. No one would come.

 

  
He woke up.

The city was very close. He saw it in flashes. He could not feel anything.

A short time later, Jarlaxle said quietly, “Time to go.”

 

 

 


End file.
